


Hiding

by JMoonrise



Category: Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst and Feels, Childhood Trauma, Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Guilt, Healing, Love, Mystery, Suspense, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-01-03 14:50:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 25,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21181241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JMoonrise/pseuds/JMoonrise
Summary: Fairness is subjective. Some people deserve to be punished for the rest of their lives for their crimes. Claire lived through a tragedy that changed her life, punishing herself for something she didn’t do.





	1. Chapter 1

_ Twenty years _ , practically an entire lifetime, but it wasn’t enough for her to forget the stain that marred her past. The newspapers and other outlets had dug out the story in memoriam for what was one of the sickest, most disturbing stories to hit the stands in recent memory.

Claire shook her head at the headline. So many memories attempted to force their way to the surface, but she shoved them deep down. All they served to do was to remind her where she came from, and the history she couldn’t escape. A name change couldn’t fix what happened, but it was a bandage. It helped keep her together and to prevent the stares, the looks of horror and pity, and worse of all the judgment. Some of the looks were calculating, wondering just who was the girl at the center of one of the biggest crimes of the century. How did she fit into the narrative? She did her best to fade out of the spotlight after everything. It was the last thing she wanted to be associated with. 

Sensation didn’t begin to describe the coverage nor the reach of the story. Everyone knew who she was, where she came from, and what she was. They knew the specifics. She was bombarded by the press and those fascinated with the case until she found a way to make herself disappear. 

“Oh bloody awful that I remember my mum would send me to bed early when the news came on nightly. She was right scared and anxious for months until they caught that monster.” Claire jumped at the sudden intrusion of Laura, a coworker, and a terribly nosy gossip. “Did I give you a fright? You’re a bit jumpy.”

She shook her head. “Sorry, I wasn't expecting anyone to be in the breakroom. I didn’t hear you come in.”

Laura lowered herself into the seat across from Claire, either obtuse about her need to be alone, or completely ignoring it. “So do you remember this? I mean it’s difficult not to when it was everywhere for ages. I think it was a whole year before the entire mess was settled.”

Claire tightly nodded, swallowing painfully at the sudden dryness gripping her throat. She had to keep it together. She couldn’t lose her composure after all these years, especially in front of someone who could spread information faster than a cheetah. Laura was always ready to sniff out her next victim. “Um yeah, my mum was terrified and wouldn’t let me out of the house after dark. I was to come straight home from school. She was stricter than usual.” 

“What do you reckon happened to the girl?”

Her face froze and the air in the room seemed thinner. “Girl?” 

“Yeah, the one that was talked about for ages and who testified in court against the bastard. Where do you think she is now? My mum said she just disappeared in the aftermath of the trial and the final verdict. Said something about her leaving the country or something.”

“Yes, yes I read that somewhere or another. Uh… I can’t say. If I were her, I would live my life away from it all in complete obscurity. It couldn’t have been easy.” 

“Hey wasn’t she called Claire as well?”

Claire’s eyes lowered as she worked to cover her emotions. “It’s a fairly common name, but I think it was Clara.”

“Suppose you’re right, feel bad for the poor girl, but I know a lot of people blamed her.”

They did. 

“She was just ten.”

Laura shrugged. “They don’t care about that in the end. The public regularly shifts blame. I do feel sorry for the girl and hope she escaped from the entire mess. It’s a pile of dung if you ask me. My neighbors talked about the case for months and debated regularly about the girl and her involvement.”

“Yes.”

“You’re awfully quiet over there. Do you not have an opinion on the issue?” Laura scrutinized her carefully, clearly searching for some fodder or another with which to regale the hospital staff. Claire was an oddity amongst them. She participated just enough, but there was something different about her. Enough of her colleagues had told her she was very private, she hadn’t disagreed. They hardly knew her and she would never allow them. 

“Not much to say about something that happened eons ago. I must be going, but maybe we can have a cuppa again some other time?” 

They both knew it would never come to pass. Claire was dodgy and quick with excuses as to why she was unable to attend any event from a charity function to dinner at a coworker’s home. She was notorious for her odd behavior that many no longer bothered with her. 

Claire inhaled sharply as soon as the door closed and quickly exhaled as she tried to get herself together. She couldn’t afford to let anything slip, not after all this time. The anniversary would soon pass, and it would be forgotten for a time until the next. She could get through this after all she had done it for the last twenty.

No one needed to find out that Claire was in fact Claire Elizabeth Beauchamp, daughter of Henry Beauchamp, serial killer. Her father had brutally murdered thirty females aged ten to forty across the British Isles and was only caught because of his ten year old daughter. 

  
  



	2. Chapter 2

Though never directly asked what it was that caused her to leave her bed that night, she would have freely admitted it was the overwhelming silence. In her poetic days, she called it the silence of silence. The quiet nearly suffocated her and served to heighten all of her senses. The lack of nighttime noises terrified her as she normally drew comfort from the sounds of nocturnal animals, the wind rustling the leaves, and the movement of her old, rickety house. Yet that night, it was all still. 

There was something wrong, only she couldn’t determine what it was. Normally, the soft padding of her feet on the cold floorboards was enough to get her mother out of bed, rushing to her side in an attempt to quickly tuck her back in, but Claire had made the complete journey to her parents’ bedroom without a single sound from one of the occupants. She believed her mother was likely sleeping soundly, while unusual wasn’t cause for worry. It had been a long week at work. 

Claire jiggled the doorknob with the gentlest touch to check for locked doors. Occasionally her parents locked it when they preferred not to be interrupted. Her mother promised after her next birthday they would discuss why husbands and wives desired privacy. Her sister told her bits and pieces but preferred not to go into too much detail about it.

The brass knob turned and the door opened with a soft click. In her drowsy state, she released the door, and nearly jumped out of her skin at the creaking of the ancient hinges. She entered the room to discover a completely empty bed. The sheets weren’t turned down either, which meant her parents hadn’t gone to bed. It was impossible as there weren’t any lights on in the house as far as she could tell. 

She frowned and silently began to panic as Claire had never liked the darkness. Shadows terrified her, and most nights she slept with the blanket over her head in fear of what lurked in the dark. Her mother attempted on more than one occasion to coerce her into the open, but she would not be dissuaded. Her older sister’s tauntings weren’t enough to change her mind. Claire was of the mind that it was better to be safe than sorry. 

“Mummy?” She whispered, the dark swallowing the sound. She was hesitant to leave the confines of her parents’ room in fear of the potential dangers lurking in the dark. Her breathing quickened as she heard a loud thump from below her. She squeezed her eyes shut and pressed herself against the wall. “What should I do?” Her parents taught her at age three to dial 999 if she felt she was in serious danger, but she didn’t want to make a false call. It could’ve been her parents stumbling around in the dark for all she knew. 

Claire slid down the wall and rocked herself until she decided what action she would take. It was better to know what she was dealing with, and she could wake Sarah so she wasn’t alone in her nighttime wanderings. Sarah was much braver than her even if she was only a year older. She would know what to do. 

Claire quickly crossed the hallway to her sister’s bedroom where she discovered another empty bed, only her bedsheets were rumpled. It wasn’t possible as their mother had tucked Poppy into bed right after her. She heard their soft murmurs as she drifted off to sleep. Poppy was a heavy sleeper and rarely woke during the night. There was no plausible reason for her not to be there. 

Tears cascaded down Claire’s cheeks as she considered the stories on the news recently about the women and girls found murdered across Great Britain. Her mum tried to shelter her and Sarah from it, but it was difficult when the kids at school talked about it. 

People were terrified. Her mother restricted their time outside to primarily the back garden and they were to come straight home after school. She was not to be persuaded on the matter. Some of them had been killed in their own homes, yet the killer managed to escape without a trace of evidence left behind at the scene. The police were baffled at the grotesque nature of the murders and had few leads as no one seemed to see anything. There weren’t any fingerprints left at the scene. Particulates were absent. There was nothing. The public was panicking at the thought of a monster on the loose. 

Claire started suffering from nightmares every night after hearing about the little girl in Birmingham. The photo of the girl they displayed on the nightly news resembled her from the golden ringlets to similarly shaped faces. After Claire told her mother that her mother allowed her to leave the light on and to lock her door at night. She occasionally slept in Claire’s bed with her on the nights when the girl refused to settle down. 

All she could think about was what she overheard a girl in year seven tell her friend. Claire didn’t want to die, especially not like that. 

She began to shake as there was an accompaniment of noises beneath her. There were muffled voices, but she couldn’t bring herself to move. She buried her head in her knees and sobbed. A scream jerked her out of her mind, and she knew she would have to do something soon. 

“I can be brave. I have to be brave.” She chanted to herself as she made her way to the stairs. Having grown up in the house all her life, she knew which steps to avoid if she didn’t want anyone to hear her. Their only phone was in their kitchen. 

Her body froze mid-step as the voices cleared. They were still somewhat muffled, but she could hear her mum. “Please, don’t do th-”

Claire’s breath left her as she sat up in bed. Hair stuck to the sticky contours of her face and her heart attempted to jump out of her chest. “It’s alright. Just breathe Claire. You’re not there. You’re not there. You’re okay.” 

She closed her eyes and listened for the sounds of her flat. In the distance, her cat snored, the sound of her heating cut on, and a car door closed outside. There was a sense of normality and her heart began to slow as she familiarized herself once again with her surroundings.

All of those noises were reminders that she was no longer in that hellish place. She escaped and never looked back. To move on, she had to bury her past, or else she would go completely mad. 

The British press crucified her family as if they knew the monster lurking behind the kindly Dr. Henry Beauchamp rested inside of her. Even as an adult, she couldn’t reconcile the image she had of her father growing up with the horrid man gracing the front page of major newspapers. There was a glint in his eyes showing the depths of a true monster, one without any morals to hold him back. Claire never imagined the day where she would be terrified of the man who taught her how to ride a bike and patched her up when she scraped her knee. 

The worst bit of the entire ordeal was that deep down inside a tiny part of her loved him still. She hated that part of herself. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do apologize for the amount of time I've been away. It's easier to get yourself sorted out when you're not worrying about obligations and expectations. I wouldn't classify myself as all better or anything that extreme, but I would say I'm in a better headspace than I was three months ago. My updates will more than likely continue to be sporadic for a while, but it is my intention to finish all of them.At the moment, I don't have much written for them. Writer's block has impeded me at every turn, but it's slowly improving. 
> 
> Anyway, I would love to bring back my end of chapter questions. I can already predict most of the answers for obvious reasons, but who knows since it is random.  
Are you left or right handed?  
I am left handed. I used to like looking around at my classmates when I was in school to see if there was anyone else left handed, but most of the time I was the only one.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm getting around to updating all of my stories. Some are certainly easier than others though.

Claire smiled at her young patient. “How are you doing today Emily?”

Emily grinned, showing off the gaps in her new smile. “I’m great Dr. Nelson.”

The doctor was happy to hear about her patient’s well-being. She checked over the incision and nodded her head at how it was healing. Scarring was unavoidable, but it was easily covered with clothing. “It looks like your healing fine. We didn’t detect any new growths in your last scan and your blood tests are clean.”

The little girl pumped her fist excitably causing Claire to laugh at her antics. Emily was by far one of her favorite patients. “Do you have any kids?”

She was taken aback by the question. It wasn’t one she hadn’t heard before as many colleagues and acquaintances questioned why someone such as herself remained single and childless. “No, I don’t.” She replied, hopefully answering the girl’s question, and curtailing any other ones.

Emily wasn’t deterred by the curt response. Her brows knit together as she surveyed her doctor. “Why? Don’t you want any?”

Yes, she wanted them. There were a great many things she desired, but she resigned herself to never having them. She would taint her children the way her father tarnished her. He was a black stain on her soul, one that permanently marked her. She wouldn’t subject a child to the horror of her past, especially her own child.

“I did once when I was your age.” The lie slipped past without an ounce of guilt attached. “I’ve got other worries like nosy patients named Emily.” She bopped the girl on the nose. Emily giggled and batted the doctor’s hands away.

“You’re silly. Do you have a boyfriend?”

“Nope, I’m afraid I’m terribly boring. I’ve got a cantankerous cat, but that’s it.”

“Have you seen the new doctor?”

Claire heard about him. She doesn’t spend much time listening to hospital gossip, nor does she introduce herself to new employees. She preferred to keep to herself, and it has worked for her. “I haven’t had the pleasure.” Lying was second hand nature to her. It was like breathing. Her life was a lie, and if the truth were to come out about her past, she has no idea what would happen. “I’ve been quite busy and just came back from holiday.”

She hadn’t gone anywhere. She told people she was going north when in reality she locked herself in her flat with enough provisions for two weeks. Her mobile remained off and she stayed on her sofa, binging television shows and watching films she didn’t have time to see when they were in the cinema.

She kept human interaction outside of the hospital at a minimum. She knew the grocer at her local market and a few of the bag and stock boys. She was friendly with her neighbor in case of an emergency, however there was no one in her life she would describe as close.

“Maybe you should meet him. He’s really handsome. My mummy has a crush on him. She says something about his sparkly blue eyes, whatever that means.” Claire missed the innocence of childhood. Emily was blessed to live the life she did. There was no boogeyman hiding in her closet, waiting to come out and terrorize her. “He seemed nice when we came in last week after my sister sprained her wrist.”

Claire rolled her eyes, realizing belatedly her young patient was attempting to set her up with the new ER doctor. “While it is awfully kind of you to sing his praises, I think I can pick out my own boyfriend.” In other words, she told Emily to drop it.

The young girl shrugged with a carefree smile. She saw the sadness reflected in her doctor’s eyes. Dr. Nelson tried to hide it, but Emily knew sadness. She knew how it took hold of a person and that it didn’t go away on its’ own. When Emily lost her hair during her cancer treatments, she cried and attempted to fake happiness for those around her. That was harder than admitting she was miserable. She wanted to keep her family’s spirits up and if she were sad, it would make them sad too.

It took a long time to tell her mum about how she felt. They talked a lot and it helped in the end to reveal the truth instead of constantly hiding those feelings of despair. Dr. Nelson reminded her of scared animals. There was something broken in her gaze and Emily wanted to help her heal like she helped Emily.

Her mum told her though that you can only help someone who wanted to be saved. If a person didn’t help themselves, there was nothing she could do to change that. Was that the reason Dr. Claire rarely smiled and if she did, it didn’t reach her eyes? Emily was curious. However, she pried too much and Dr. Nelson was irritated with her. “I’m sorry if I was being too nosy. My mum says I don’t know how to mind my own business.”

Claire sent Emily a reassuring smile to prove she wasn’t upset with her. “It’s fine Emily. Alright, everything looks good and I won’t see you back here for sometime. Remember to take it easy and if you feel sick to call.”

Emily nodded. “Thank you so much again,” she threw her arms around the doctor, squeezing the woman who saved her life. Without Dr. Nelson, Emily was afraid to consider the possibility of what would have happened to her.

Emily chipped away at the walls surrounding her heart, and she found herself quite fond of her patient. She was one of her first when she was hired over a year ago. “Alright your mum is right outside, so let’s go tell her that everything is good.”

The doctor followed the girl to her mother, Michelle who paced with her phone pressed to her ear. There was a grim expression on her face as she talked to whoever it was on the other end. When she spotted them, she muttered a few words and hung up. “So what’s the verdict?” Claire read the worry and anxiety on her face, and smiled softly at her. “Good news then?”

“Yes, Emily’s scans were clear. Her blood tests came back within normal range.”

The mother whooped for joy, scooping up her daughter, holding her tight, kissing her all over her face. “Oh thank god,” she repeated over and over.

“We won’t need to see her back here for a while, so you can make an appointment at reception and I’ll see you at your next appointment. If she starts to feel ill or anything, do not hesitate to call or bring her in if you’re worried.”

Michelle nodded with her face buried in her daughter’s downy blonde hair. It had grown into a chin length bob, which was a massive improvement over where it was when they met. Michelle thanked her profusely once again as if she hadn’t done it several times since the surgery a while back. Claire doesn’t mind, knowing that Michelle needed to, she just enjoys the knowledge she’s keeping families together, the opposite of her father.

She had to constantly repeat to herself that she was a good person. Every morning as she stared at her reflection in the mirror, her eyes tracing over the outline of her figure, she said the words she and her therapist came up with together.

Claire left the mother and daughter to head to the break room. She could use a cup of tea to settle her nerves. When she entered, there was someone unfamiliar occupying the room. A frown marred her face at the sight of the stranger.

It was a man with cropped ginger hair, dark blonde stubble, high cheekbones, and the most striking blue eyes she ever saw. He was handsome from a theoretical standpoint and if Claire was the dating type, perhaps she would ask him out. She wasn’t though. She refused to entertain the idea of entangling someone with her and her dark family saga.

The stranger grinned at her, one of those panty dropping kind. He was beautiful and slightly disarming with his easy affection.

She turned away from him and hurriedly pours the steaming water over a tea bag. At least, it was one less thing she had to do. She took the time to observe him from her peripheral. He sat there, swirling the spoon, lost in thought.

She nearly opened her mouth to ask him if he wanted to talk about it, catching herself at the last second, but not before a squeaking sound erupted from her throat. Her eyes slammed shut in abject horror, heat rising to her skin as she feels the stranger’s eyes on her.

“Are ye okay lass?”

“You’re Scottish.” She stupidly said.

Half his mouth ticked up at her blunt observation. “Aye, and I’ll assume ye’re a Sassenach.”

She wrinkled her nose at the name. “Ugh.” She hated the word after some of the Scottish victims’ families hurled the slur at her when she was escorted to court. “I hate that word.”

“It isna always the kindest word, but I dinna mean to insult ye.”

Strangely, she believed him. Normally, she didn’t trust the word of people, but he had done nothing to her. “Sorry just some bad memories associated with it.”

He nodded his head. “Ye look familiar. Have we met?” He stared at her with his piercing eyes full of recognition. It was impossible as she moved back right before accepting the position and he recently started on staff. She had come back from her time off two days ago.

“I don’t think so.” She sent a silent prayer to a God she rarely talked to in the fervent hope that this man didn’t connect the dots or posses an amazing facial memory.

Realistically no one would suspect her as the daughter of one of the most notorious mass murderer’s in history. Her hair darkened after to a medium brown and she lost the roundness of youth in her cheeks, and her body eventually blossomed into that of a woman and not a girl’s.

The girl on the front page for months was blonde with a wide terror filled eyes, covered in copious amounts of blood, none of it her own, in a white nightgown, clutching the hand of the police office who fetched her from the house. A shiver traveled down her spine as the memory of the night threatened to overwhelm her. She severed the chord, preventing anymore images from filling her head. If there was a day she wanted to forget it, it was the one that ruined her life.

“I must have one of those faces.”

He hummed thoughtfully, his eyes still on her. “Maybe, what is yer name?”

“Dr. Claire Nelson,” she told him confidently. “I’m a pediatric oncologist.”

“I’m Dr. James Fraser, I work in the ER.”

A rushing sound pounded in her ears and the world slipped away when he introduced himself as James Fraser, son of Ellen Fraser, unlucky victim number 22. James was at the trial. He was a witness to his mother’s abduction.

Her stomach twisted uncomfortably and she runs. She ran as fast and far as her feet would carry her, away from the boy whose mother was murdered by her father.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Seriously though, last fall I had a massive obsession with documentaries and podcasts about serial killers. I mean don't get me wrong they terrify me in the worst way possible, but there is still something fascinating. I would never admire them because that's disturbing, but it boggles my mind how someone can ceaselessly murder so many individuals.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two in a row!! My excitement for the story has been restored and I'm excited. More of that night and the resulting aftermath will unfold eventually. Now onto where we last left Claire as she left Jamie.

She ran into the private restroom reserved for staff, locking the door behind her, barring anyone from entering after her. She was aware several of her colleagues witnessed her emotionally distressed state as she traversed the corridors of the hospital, and she wasn’t looking forward to the inevitable inquiries they would direct at her.

Claire dropped to her knees in front of the toilet, purging the entire contents of her stomach into the porcelain bowl. She continued to heave, despite the accompanied empty feeling leftover. Her insides ached but her body wasn’t done.

With a shuddering, gasping breath she pulled away, her hand lightly brushing against the flusher to make everything disappear. The lingering smell of vomit was a stark reminder of her ordeal. It was putrid and clung to her clothing. She would take the remainder of the day off, citing sickness as the cause.

She slumped against the cold tile wall, her head leaned at an uncomfortable angle, not that she cared. The nightmare of running into a member of one of the victim’s families was coming true and she didn’t know how to handle it.

After the trial, it was all a whirlwind. Orders of protection were issued for her as people inevitably directed blame in her direction, death threats were sent, and people attempted to break into the home where she was staying. Some followed her to school and taunted her, calling her a monster like her father. People tagged her home; they threw red paint over the garage. Her foster parents were ill-equipped to handle the unforeseen circumstances and eventually handed her back to the state for care.

Ten year old Clara hid the hurt over how easily they discarded her and never looked back. She vowed no one would make her feel as if she were nothing again.

When she was eleven nearly twelve, she met the Nelsons, an American couple residing in Birmingham for a time. They fostered her for six months before asking if she wanted to make it permanent. For the first time since she discovered the truth of her father, found his gruesome hidden room, and lost everything, she was safe.

_She stared at Tom and Kathy, skepticism plain as day in her eyes. Trust for others disappeared when she learned what lurked behind the kindly Dr. Henry Beauchamp. If someone like him could charm the pants off anyone, manage to have a family, and a strong reputation as a doctor, then she couldn’t take anyone for their word when they made claims about themselves._

_Clara religiously locked her bedroom door every night. Tom and Kathy never made an outcry about it and smiled softly at her every morning at breakfast. They seemingly accepted the quirk of hers, perhaps understanding the reasoning behind it. After all, they were privy to the details of what happened to her in that house. They were informed by her social worker as her situation was a high risk one and they needed to be aware of what they were agreeing to if they decided to foster her. Her biological family washed their hands of her, all begging off caring for her as if she carried the same inner evil as her father and she pretended she was okay with how they shunned her. Aunts, uncles, and cousins with whom she spent a great deal of time protested taking her into their homes. They patted her head with their fake smiles and their pathetic excuses, and ultimately washed their hands of Henry’s progeny._

_She was hyper intelligent, a member of Mensa, and before everything with her father was revealed attended a school for children gifted like her. She embraced that which made her different as her father proudly proclaimed it would make her stronger and prepare her for entering the world._

_Now, she hated how those words that once brought her pleasure and smugness in the form of her father’s pride over his youngest daughter made her stomach turn. Her father’s pride for her achievements revolted her._

_ Poppy was smart, not as smart as her, but she excelled in school with top marks and was popular with the other children. She possessed natural charisma and leadership skills whereas her sister was one of the least liked students, constantly bullied by her peers and socially awkward, ‘stilted’ was the word her therapist used. Yet their father didn’t heap praise on her the way he did Clara. He doted on her and compared all the ways in which they were similar. It made her feel warm inside. After everything, she hated him and wouldn’t care if she never saw his face again. He could rot in hell for all eternity. He didn’t deserve redemption in her opinion._

_She despised the therapist she was forced to visit on a bi-weekly basis. It was mandated as a way to assist her with her trauma. It was all bullshit in her esteemed opinion. Talking about it didn’t take away the flashes of blood, the sound of a knife carving into human flesh and bone, and the inhumane screams that rang in her ears every night. If anything, discussing her past with the therapist worsened it, made the memories stick around, and kept her constantly reliving that night. It replayed in her dreams, each time she tried to prevent herself from walking downstairs, from discovering the secret room where all of her family’s secrets were exposed. Still, every night, newly minted ten year old Clara climbed out bed, she padded down the corridor, turned the knob to reveal the empty bed, traveled to her sister’s room without any luck, and then snuck downstairs. A faint stream of light trickled and she followed it, wishing the whole time she had just gone back to sleep._

_“Clara?”_

_She blinked, snapping herself out of her head, and refocused on the expectant couple before her. Tom and Kathy were everything she could’ve asked for after the last two years with the trial and the appeal. Her father and his lawyer attempted to get her testimony thrown out. They tried to intimidate her on the stand. Her foster parents were her saving grace. They were compassionate, understanding, and overwhelmingly patient with her._

_They never pressed for details, or forced her to relive the horrors of her messed up childhood. After everything, she had printed out the articles detailing the different murders, utilizing her memory of her father’s whereabouts on those specific dates, and wondering why he came back absolutely delighted after every trip._

_There was a bounce in his step, a gleam in his eyes as he gifted his wife with a bouquet of flowers and delved out his carefully selected presents to his daughters. He heaped hugs and kisses on his family, crushing them to his body. He was happy and effused the merits of his job, how happy the trips made him and how he knew what his life’s purpose was, how he was fulfilling God’s work._

_She never suspected something sinister lurking beneath the surface. Clara thought her father enjoyed his job, but what made him happy was the women he left behind, mutilated, poorly disposed in some cases, and broken. Some were found with their eyes open wide with fear etched into the planes of their faces. Some he posed in a provocative way and others he had his fun before ending their lives._

_The faces of those women often appeared in her nightmares. She apologized to them, yet none of her words made the condemnation in their eyes disappear. Instead they whispered she was ‘just like him’. Those were the last words he said to her._

_Clara shook her head, her hands resting over her eyes as the tears forced their way out. She exhaled as a sob burst forth, her body trembling at the sweeping emotions coursing inside of her._

_Kathy gathered the eleven year old into her embrace, holding her tight. Clara wasn’t hers by the normal ways and she hadn’t known the girl her entire life, but through the tears and laughs, the traumatized Clara had wormed her way into her heart. There was a spot there that was waiting for the young girl to occupy. “Shh sweetheart, it’s okay.” She rocked the prepubescent in her arms as Clara fell apart._

_The older woman knew at some point all of Clara’s buried emotions would find themselves bubbling to the surface. For a child, she kept in a lot. She had control, but she was a child and she was a human. It was too much for most people to contend with, let alone a child whose life was destroyed by someone she loved._

_Tom patted her knee and rubbed her back. “Look kiddo, we are sorry if our words were hasty. If you don’t want us to adopt you, that’s okay. We won’t.”_

_Clara grasped his hand in hers. She peeked at him. “NO!” She proclaimed forcefully. It was the loudest they had ever heard her. Most of the time she spoke at a whisper level and startled easily. She licked her lips, burrowing further into Kathy. “I want to stay. I want to be with you.”_

_It took a lot longer for the courts to process the adoption with Tom and Kathy being Americans and her father halting the proceedings from prison. In that time, not a single relative stepped forward to intervene. When it was approved and she changed her name to Nelson, she decided in that moment to never look back. Being a Beauchamp was a curse and she refused to remain where she wasn’t wanted._

_She relocated to the U.S. with her new parents when she was fourteen and adapted to her new life as Claire Nelson. Clara Beauchamp was a girl who disappeared into the dredges of time. People occasionally wondered about her, attempted to track her down, but all of her records were sealed. She made sure no one was going to discover her past. She wasn't that girl anymore. _

_With the passage of time and distance, the involvement of puberty, no one recognized the woman known as Claire Nelson as the girl who graced papers for almost two whole years._

Claire fished her mobile out of her pocket, hitting one on her speed dial. It rang exactly twice before a woman’s voice answered. “Hello?”

“Mum!” She cried miserably as it all caught up to her.

“Claire bug,” Kathy heard the distress in her daughter’s voice. She infrequently received these calls from her daughter where she was absolutely inconsolable. “What’s wrong honey?” After all, it was rare for the woman to receive a call in the middle of the work day in England.

Claire sniffled, wiping her face on her sleeve. She grimaced at the action, but brushed it off. It was a concern for later. “I-I _hiccup_ he-he, th-there’s someone here. He works here.”

Kathy sighed. She wanted to hop a plan and fly to her daughter, but was aware how poorly received the idea would be at a time like this. Whatever happened Claire needed to talk first before any plans were made. “Who is he?” Claire was concise and precise to a fault unless she was emotionally distraught, then she stuttered and mumbled her way through an explanation. “I need you to use words.”

“There’s a new doctor.” Kathy didn’t understand the issue. It wasn’t as if her daughter dated. Claire boldly informed them she held no interest in dating anyone ever. She put all of her focus into graduating high school at sixteen and lived at home during her undergrad. She piled on the courses, anything to distract from her lack of a personal life. She spent all of her time at home much to their increasing concern. “He… well he’s the son of-“ Claire gasped for air. She couldn’t breathe. Her lungs constricted painfully as she tried to focus on her surroundings, but everything around her was a blur. She panicked and began to cry.

“Honey, you know what you have to do. You’re having a panic attack.”

She passively heard her mother’s soothing voice through the rushing of blood in her ears, _thump, thump, thump, _echoed over and over. She felt the heat rise and sweat poured down her face as her chest rose and fell faster and faster. Her hands began to tremble, and she tried to take a deep breath but it was caught in her throat. Instead of deep, even breaths, they were sharp and shallow, harsh sounding rasps in her ears.

Her heart pounded harder, erratically, and her legs and arms refused to listen to commands from her brain. Her vision became narrower and it was if the world was spinning around her like in a kaleidoscope.

Her mother’s steady voice was there, but it was as if she was underwater. The sound was muddled and she couldn’t focus on what was being said. All she could think was how she was there again with all of the faces staring at her, with the pictures of her father’s crimes, with the verbal assaults from people she didn’t know, and facing the people her father hurt. She was stuck in that dark place.

She didn’t know how long she sat there lost, but eventually she came back to herself. It was a slow process as awareness came back to her.

Her breaths evened out. Her vision cleared. Her heart beat at steady rate. Her body cooled down. Her hands no longer shook. She inhaled and slowly exhaled. “Mum?” She called. “I-I’m alright now. I’ll call you later. I’m going to call my therapist and arrange for an emergency session.”

Kathy acquiesced. “That’s fine honey. Call me later and we will talk. If you need me, I’ll be on the next flight out.”

Claire didn’t doubt her mother’s words. “Tell dad and Laura I love them.”

“I will. Bye Claire, I love you.”

“Love you too.”

She immediately dialed her therapist’s office to arrange a last minute session. Luckily, she was able to rearrange her afternoon for Claire, and her secretary told her to come as soon as possible.

Claire shed a few tears as she stood on shaky legs. She walked over to the sink to take stock of her appearance and frowned when she noticed the thin film of sweat coating her skin, the dark circles lining her eyes, the smudged mascara, the ruffled hair, and the pallor of her skin. The chalky white color did nothing for her except contribute to the idea she was sick.

One glance at her and she was sent home.

She caught a glimpse of ginger as she lift doors shut and turned her head, squeezing her eyes closed. If there was one thing she could do, it was to stay as far away from James Fraser as she could manage. No good would come from being near him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Claire found her own way to handle the trauma. We will get into what happened to her mother and sister but not just yet. So thoughts?


	5. Chapter 5

“What triggered you? We’ve worked extensively on preparing you for when you find yourself having panic attacks and you’ve progressed very well when it comes to getting yourself through them. So tell me what happened.”

Claire counted the ceiling tiles as she ruminated over her psychiatrist’s request. She was perfectly aware of what her trigger point was this time, which wasn’t always the case. There were times when she found herself spiraling into a panic attack without knowing the cause. She gripped the smooth material of the sofa on which she lay as her mind recounted the events of two hours ago. It was staggering to think whole days hadn’t passed since the unexpected encounter with James Fraser.

_His blood runs through you, it’s poisonous and continues to infect every facet of your life. Like he told me, I will never be rid of him. We are the same._

“There is someone at the hospital.” Dr. Roberts stared blankly at her. With Claire it was a long drawn out process that required extensive and excessive patience, care, and empathy. Having read her case files from all of her doctors over the course of twenty years, she discovered a discrepancy. Outside of the courtroom and perhaps inside it, Claire had never in all of her time under psychiatric care recounted the full events of what occurred in that house.

Conclusions were drawn and there was speculation about what transpired, but there were four people in the house that night. And they were the only ones who knew what happened, and silence was a friend that never betrayed. She had learned early on in their sessions that trust wasn’t readily given and that Claire opened when she felt she was safe. Whatever her father had done to her when she was ten years old permanently altered her. From what she read, prior to the discovery of her father’s horrific actions and alter ego, Claire was by all accounts a happy and well-adjusted child with all the tools to succeed in life. After that night where the police were called into her home to arrest her father and she was removed from her childhood home, Claire Nelson, formerly Beauchamp retreated into herself, becoming a shell of the bright and lively girl who believed her father was a man of integrity and virtuous.

That little girl soon discovered the man behind the facade and it terrified her to the point she buried all of her feelings in memories so deep that the only time they surfaced was in her dreams. She suffered from nightmares because of her reluctance to remember.

“James Fraser,” Claire eventually added. She hadn’t thought of the boy in years, after the trial she did her best to put it all behind her, to forget she was related to an immoral man who murdered and raped women and girls. Some of those girls resembled her, and her heart clenched painfully out of guilt for the families. It was her fault their daughters didn’t have an opportunity to grow into women. It was all on her that their lives were cut short. Her father chose his younger victims because they reminded him of the apple of his eye.

When called to testify in court, they had nearly everyone removed from the room, but he was there. He stared at her with his sick, dead eyes, that cold and penetrating gaze haunted her dreams. She saw the way his lips curled into that sinister grin, revealing him to be the devil he was. “His mother was one of the victims. She was number 22.” She thought of all of them, had their order memorized and organized in a mental timeline.

She knew what had been done to each of them, how her father brutalized them, tortured them, ravaged their bodies before leaving them bent and broken for someone to eventually find. Some he left at the scene of his crimes, while others he dumped recklessly, but without a hint of trace evidence left behind. He was thorough and meticulous. He used a condom and disposed of it after, and he always used surgical gloves so as not to leave any touch evidence. He cleaned afterwards to prevent investigators from finding anything of use. Claire struggled to reconcile someone who could do all of that, plan and execute such grisly crimes with the man who tucked her into bed, read her stories, and made her feel safe. He single handedly ripped all of that from her in one night. He ruined the perception of her childhood. Her rose coloured glass were gone and she saw everything as it was.

“Henry,” she doesn’t call him her father out loud. She refused to address him that way after the trial and her eventual adoption. He contributed DNA and raised her for those first ten years, but he forfeited the right when he joined the ranks of Bundy and all of the other prolific serial killers riddled throughout the last century. He was as evil as them and lacked remorse for his crimes. “He snatched her when she was out shopping with her twelve year old son James. He pulled her into his van and drove off. Hers was one of the worst and what he did to her,” she swallowed back bile as she recalled what the papers wrote about it, the detailed descriptions from the court room floated into her mind. “It made identification of her body difficult. He vivisected her while she was still alive and carved out chunks of her face.”

His psych evaluation illuminated everyone to his state of mind and how long his cruelty had gone on. It started in his childhood when he murdered his first pet and then a classmate. The body had never been found, and Henry was keeping the information to himself, even all these years later.

“He had her tied up. He burned her with cigarettes and carved the word slut into her chest. There were other things he did, but I would rather not.”

Dr. Roberts wasn’t terribly surprised by Claire’s distance from the subject. She mentioned her dreams with all of the victims, but was firm in her resolve to stray away from conversations concerning them. She adroitly avoided discussing her childhood and the trial.

“James was called to testify. He had only caught a glimpse of the man who took his mother, but he was asked to relay the events of that day for the courts. Henry had kept her for three days before he… you know… and he let her suffer. He wanted her to and he enjoyed it, while she begged for mercy and recited prayers, pleading with God, anyone to save her and preserve her eternal soul.”

Henry was gleeful as he recounted the stories of his victims’ last moments. His sickening smile coupled with the empty shells he called eyes, he scared everyone who came into close contact with him. With everything out in the open after he was caught, he no longer had to wear his mask, to pretend to be someone he was not.

“I saw him there.” He was fourteen then with his gingery curls falling in his eyes, the broken expression on his face as he talked about his mother, and the overwhelming sadness that enveloped him. “He was always there with his father. I was witness to the entire trial.” She wouldn’t forget the haunted looks in the eyes of the family members who took the stand. Some of them had purple bruises under their eyes, their faces gaunt with lack of food and sleep, and it was all because of a single man. One man had destroyed the lives of so many. “His family was the nicest. The other families glared at me and refused to acknowledge me. There was no pity or empathy when I was called as witness. I overheard them whispering how apples don’t fall far from trees.”

At eleven nothing had hurt more than people comparing her to him, likening her to that monstrous man damaged her. She understood then how he infiltrated the deepest parts of her, infecting her with his darkness and how she was like him. “He found me crying once when I was hiding, my court appointed official wasn’t particularly good at watching over me, and sometimes I needed the escape from the heaviness of the courtroom.” Every time she stepped inside, there was a weight pressing down her and the air was so thick, she struggled to breathe. The tension was the worst and she did her best to ignore the stares of a thousand eyes, each one waiting for her to crack, to show her true colors.

“He wanted to know how I was doing.” She thought he was a strange boy, checking in on the eleven year old girl whose father was responsible for his mother’s death. She developed a tiny crush on him, not that she ever said anything. She was a kid and he was a teenager. He was just a nice boy from a nice family who suffered a great tragedy. Most people lost sight that she had suffered at the hands of her father.

“I saw him in the break room.” The words came spilling out. “He looks the same in a lot of ways. It was his eyes though that I remembered. They were always so kind and understanding, which didn’t make a lick of sense to me.” He baffled her at every turn, only revving her interest in him as he was unlike everyone she was surrounded by at the time. “There weren’t many children in attendance, well actually aside from me there were none, except Jamie and his older sister. The parents of the girls who were murdered left their other children at home.”

She was lonely. It was a feeling she had little experience with as her mother or sister were there to share their company when she was down. Without them, she had no one. She was awash in her own misery and there was no one there for her. She was in official custody, not as a person of interest, but she had to be protected during the trial. They kept her separated from her father, which didn’t bother her in the least, she refused his requests to visit. “He made it a little less lonely for me. I was isolated at the time. I wasn’t allowed to attend school or go to the park. They kept me indoors with the press and the people angry with my father.”

Dr. Roberts read up on Claire’s solitary lifestyle at the time. The few friends Claire had before it all were forbidden from contacting her by their prejudiced parents and she was kept inside for her own protection when letters poured in, issuing death threats against a child. The press refused to leave her alone and considered her fair game in the trial of the century. There was no escaping the reality of her life, if only for a few hours, as every aspect of her life was touched by what happened.

“Why did seeing him cause you to have such a visceral reaction?”

Claire bit her lip, her eyes still focused on the ceiling tiles. She had counted them dozens of times in the last hour or so. There was a brown stain on one of them and she wondered if it was the result of water damage. It seemed like a plausible scenario. Another tile was mismatched, a shade or two lighter than the rest of them. How could someone make a flub like that? They would have to be blind not to notice the differences.

“Would you accept I don’t know as a suitable answer?” Her eyes darted to her doctor, and she sighs, sinking into the cushions. “It caught me off guard. The other day, one of my coworkers, a terribly nosy gossip, she saw the headline about the anniversary and talked about it.” She was powerless to change the topic, to dissuade Laura from pursuing a discussion based on Claire’s real life events. Laura had mentioned her having the same name, and Claire shuddered, _if only she knew_. “She mentioned her mother’s reaction and how she was kept inside, and then asked me about what I was doing during that time.”

Claire was living in blissful innocence at the expense of others.

“What did you say?” Dr. Roberts was curious about her response. The anniversary was bringing up painful memories, and Claire’s nightmares were nearly every night compared to the one or two times a week in the past. She was drowning in it. It was swallowing her whole, and there wasn’t anything she could do to help the woman. Claire allowed it to happen, believing she deserved it as penance for her father’s sins.

“I froze at first. My brain was still going, but I was freaked out.” Laura wasn’t the most deductive person on the planet, but she had noticed her reaction. She just attributed it to remembering the events, but she didn’t know, couldn’t know what was really going through her mind then. “Before I found out- you know when everything was normal I guess, not that it was ever normal given my father’s activities on the side and his proclivity for rape and murder… but before all of that, we were like everyone else. My mum kept up with the news and instructed us to go straight home after school. She would sleep in my bed on the nights when I was scared, especially after… just after.” Emily Parks was ten years old, with a head full of blonde curls, bright brown eyes, and a beatific smile that lip up every room she walked in.

She was last seen walking home after parting with her friends and promising to see them on Monday. What she didn’t know was that she wouldn’t live until Monday. Emily Parks body was found Monday morning by a teacher at her school, walking to work, her body was strewn across the grass of the park in which she spent many days playing with her friends, enjoying the innocence of childhood and her short life as she unknowingly walked into her death.

Claire sat frightened atop her bed, her arms curled tightly around her legs as she rocked back and forth, tears streaming down her face when she caught sight of the news reel for the evening. He had struck again, this time murdering a girl who could double as her twin. So far none of the deaths were anywhere near where she lived, but that didn’t stop nightmares from terrorizing her every night when she closed her eyes. If there was a death that stuck with her, it was Emily Parks.

She made sure to keep her distance from the girl’s parents. She didn’t want to cause them any undue stress or grief over her appearance.

“She was scared too. I didn’t recognize it then because she was an adult. They seemed to have everything together and she seemed larger than life. She taught me how to ride a bike after I got scared the first time and she was there holding my hand the day I started a new school without my sister. She was there through it all.”

Claire rarely spoke about her mother, unable to voice her thoughts and feelings aloud about the woman who gave her life. Julia was her champion and encouraged her at every turn. Sometimes she embarrassed Claire as she was chaos personified. She was different from the other parents at school, and while she appreciated it at home, she desired her mother to be like them when they were in public. As she grew older without her mother by her side, she hated how ashamed she was of the woman who wanted nothing but the best for her. She dismissed her when Julia attempted to kiss her cheek at drop off and brushed off her declarations of love, taking for granted her mother’s presence, thinking she would be there always. She no longer remembered the sound of her mother’s voice, couldn’t picture her reassuring smile when lightening flashed across her bedroom and the thunder sent her crawling under the sheets. She forgot the specific shade of blue of her eyes, or how they lit up whenever she and her sister were near. She couldn’t recall the melodious laugh that filled countless memories from her childhood. The musical timbre of her voice was what she missed the most besides the warm hugs that comforted her when she was distressed.

Her mother was the gold standard that all mother’s should be. She was her pillar, holding her up until she wasn’t.

“I didn’t get to say goodbye.” A tear slid out, falling sideways into her hair. “The funeral was private and my mother’s family didn’t want me there.” They shut her out and there wasn’t anything she could do at the time. More tears slipped as she started crying harder. “They didn’t want me.”

Dr. Roberts knew Claire had living blood relatives, however the details surrounding her adoption were sealed and Claire, herself didn’t talk about it. She said it didn’t bother her after all this time when it did. “How did that make you feel then?”

“Like I was nothing, something passed around and unwanted. I had different foster parents before my parents adopted me. They couldn’t handle it any longer after my name was released and my location revealed.” There was a breach in the system and someone within her social worker’s office sold the information to the press. There were consequences but it was too late. It was out there. “I was harassed at school, in the group home, and the press were everywhere.” After her adoption, she loved the anonymity. She was free from the pointed stares, the vicious gossip and cutting words, the threats, and she embraced it all. “Through all of that I didn’t forget the one person who showed me an ounce of kindness despite his world falling apart.” He was the bright part in her dark shrouded world. “Seeing him again brought it all back though and it’s been a tough week with the memorial coming up in a week.”

“You’ve spent a long time running. No one blames you for that. What happened to you was… there aren’t words to describe it. You lived through something people can’t imagine and you’re still here. I know you don’t want to hear this, but you’re strong and you’re nothing like him.” Her words rang sincere, but she was conflicted about believing them.

It was easy for her doctor to say all of that as she was unaffected. She didn’t walk around as the daughter of a serial killer, his name literal mud, and anyone related to him deemed filth too. She didn’t understand.

“I don’t want him to know it’s me. It was one thing to show empathy towards a little girl. But he’s had years to think about it and feel the loss of his mother.”

“Like you feel the loss of yours. Do you blame your father?”

Of course she did. How could she not?

“Are you still angry with him?”

The inclusion of the word ‘still’ made her pause. Still implied there was a time where it would inevitably stop, that a time would come where the hole in heart would disappear, that she could stop feeling this way, but she knows that day will never come. She walked around empty, unable to join the rest of the world because like those families, she’s fundamentally broken. He stole something from her that night. There was no healing for her. She could never go back. “I never stopped.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Claire is at a crucial juncture in her life. She's stuck between the past she thought she left behind and her present. She doesn't think about her future much if that helps with getting into her headspace.


	6. Chapter 6

Claire thinks about her childhood often, the time before her father was revealed to the world. Back then, she had a great life with parents who loved and doted on her, an older sister she admired, and she never thought anything was missing from her life, nor did she consider something wasn’t right.

“Tell me something about your life that no one knows about.”

She has thousands of details, memories, attributes she refrained from sharing with anyone. She locked it all away and created a new version of herself, one impervious to the pitfalls of life. If she never expected anything from anyone, then they could never disappoint her. In her teens, she began reading Sylvia Plath, identifying with her in a way she hadn’t with others. Books became her friends and helped her to hide from anyone who attempted to get too close.

“My sister, Poppy was my best friend. I spent an active amount of my childhood envious of her.” She regrets some of the repulsive thoughts that passed through her mind when she was a child, too young and naive to know any better. 

Poppy and her were like the sun and the moon, night and day, sisters in every way possible but complete and total opposites in their personalities and interests.

“She and I complimented each other. She was outgoing and charismatic unlike me. She did well in school, never as well as me, and I suppose it did bother her.”

Her sister hid her jealousy, plastering a fake, pleasant smile on her face when Claire brought home her exemplary marks, boasting about her placement as best in her year. She exclaimed how happy she was her younger sister was invited to join Mensa and was accepted into an elite private school for gifted children. Claire spent a staggering amount of time stewing in her own jealousy and her sister did the same, neither considering how the other felt.

“She didn’t say anything.” Poppy cheered for her and encouraged her in all of her academic pursuits albeit at her own expense. “Her school performance lowered when she went to high school and she focused on her other interests.” Claire rarely thinks of her sister, the pain nearly cripples her when she allows her mind to drift to a time before she was the person she became with the Nelsons. Poppy for all of her faults was everything she wanted to be and more. She wonders what she’d be like as an adult, if their relationship would’ve changed as they grew out of adolescence.

When Claire transferred into her care, Dr. Roberts made it a mission to read all of Claire’s previous records to get a sense on how best to help her. Her newest patient was different than her current or previous ones. They all suffered from various forms of PTSD, anxiety, and depression, however none of them had a colourful history like Claire’s full of violence, horror, and unspeakable acts. There was abuse or traumatic events triggering them, but they still paled in comparison to the woman who walked into her office on the rare sunny day with a broken spirit and reeking of despair. Claire wasn’t like any of them. She refrained from commenting on the weather and simply took a seat on the sofa, staring straight ahead at the wall.

“That night Poppy wasn’t in her bed. She went to bed right after me. She got to stay up an extra fifteen minutes because she was older and she was supposed to be there that night.” Claire’s feels her pulse quicken as the words tumble out. “The sheets were thrown back as if she were forced out of bed. Her favourite blanket was strewn across her floor and her room was still like the rest of the house. I wanted to stay there, to continue hiding, but I had to do something.”   
  


Some days she wishes she had never woken, that she stayed in her bed instead of tip toeing down those stairs, catching the light peering out of the cracked door, ignored the voices inside. She has to close her eyes when it gets to be too much. It was a sensory experience with the smells, the sounds, and the things she saw.

Dr. Roberts intervenes when she observes the deep flush of her cheeks, the sweat pooling at her brow, and her shallow breathing. Her patient is fragile, stronger than she believes, but ultimately considers herself weak and broken. “You don’t have to tell me the rest.”

Admittedly, Claire is a favourite of hers with this inner strength to keep going forward, despite her past lingering over should, continuously waiting to invade her life. Claire fights to keep back her demons and she admires her for it. She uses her natural light to better the lives of children and works hard to provide for herself. Claire is the one who holds herself back.

Claire nods, relief coursing through her. “My real name is actually Clara.” After being placed with the Nelsons, she told them in the soft whisper she preferred at the time, to call her Claire. Clara was someone else, someone she wasn’t anymore. Someone who was to weak to do anything. “I changed it legally when I was adopted.” She couldn’t change it entirely; she was attached to the name her mother carefully picked for her and wanted to keep something of her as she transitioned into someone new. “My mom liked the name Clara and said from the moment she held me in her arms, I brightened her whole life. She knew our family was complete.”

“You don’t talk about her.”

There is a reason why she avoids speaking of Julia. At times, she thinks most of what she remembers of the woman are things she made up to comfort her on those sad days when she is forced to remember. Many of her memories of her childhood have faded with time, less vivid and sharp, and tinged with her own melancholy.

She shrugs from her supine position. She misses her. It is all she can say with confidence. “I like to think I remember her with perfect clarity, but that would be a falsity.” Her childhood is like a mosaic, tiny fragments pieced together. “Sometimes if I strain my mind, I can conjure her voice or her laugh, but I imagine it still doesn’t compare to the way she was in reality.”

Nothing rarely does. “I had ten years with her and that’s a third of my life. Someone else has been in the role of my mother for longer than I knew her.” As much as she loves Julia, she doesn’t know her the way she does Kathy. Kathy who took in a lost and lonely child, gave her a home and loved her with every breath in her body. “She’s a mystery to me.”

“What can you tell me about her?”

Claire struggles to form any concrete images when something springs to her mind. It is similar to having a Eureka! All of a sudden where there was nothing but a vast empty space, her recollections are filled with her mother’s smiling face. “She liked to garden. She spent every sunny day outside, soaking in the sun’s rays. She hated the beach, so we always went to resorts on holiday. She would sit next to the pool, but never went into the water.”

Her mother’s strange dislike of water seemed weird to her. She and Poppy adored jumping in a cool pool or rushing into the ocean, giggling wildly as the cold water lapped at their knees. “Most of all, she didn’t think me silly this one night when I couldn’t stop crying. She scooped me into her arms and held me tight. I felt safe, protected, and most of all loved.”

_She pushes back her blonde hair as she stares at the contours of her face in her bedroom mirror. Her brown eyes are wide and fearful, a little red and puffy after catching a brief clip on the news. She saw the girl, Emily who had blonde curly hair and brown eyes, and was the same age as herself. It was all a coincidence as she wasn’t some exceptional, rare beauty. Clara knows she has fairly bland features and there isn’t anything spectacular about her face that would make someone take a second look, not like Poppy._

_Poppy has shiny, bright blonde hair that tumbles in luscious waves down her back. Her smile is like sunshine, it fills you with warmth and makes you happy. Her blue-green eyes remind Clara of the sea unlike her plain brown ones. Poppy is tall, graceful, and well-spoken, while her younger sister is short, uncoordinated, and blunt. She tries to emulate her sister and fails at every turn. Yet tonight, is the first time in her near ten years of life where she considers for the first time that she isn’t as boring as originally thought. For some reason, a girl who was similar to her in appearance was murdered. What if the killer, the one who has terrorized their country for quite some time now, what if he crosses her path and decides to make her his next victim?_

_Hot tears pour out of her eyes and her body wracks with uncontrollable sobs, but she can’t seem to stop. She’s gasping for air, afraid death may be on the horizon sooner rather than later. Her bedroom door hits the wall and arms surround her as she shakes. She’s cold and scared._

_“Shh Clara, mummy has you.” Her mother rocks her back and forth in a soothing motion. “Breathe with me, in… now out, good girl.” They continue to breathe together until Clara’s sobs turn into hiccups and she can breathe freely without fear crushing her. She nestles her head into her mother’s chest, breathing in the familiar scents of her mother’s perfume and her garden. Julia gently strokes her hair and Clara sighs at the relaxing motion. “Do you want to tell me what’s wrong?” She shakes her head, resistant to the idea of ratting herself out and giving her mother something else to worry about with everything going on in their lives and their country._

_Her fingers drift along the hem of her mother’s shirt and she slides her palm under, pressing it against the warm skin of her mother’s abdomen. She has done it for as long as she can remember. It calms her and keeps her present. Her family jokes that her mind is always somewhere else, never staying in one place._

_“Sleep with me tonight?” Julia kisses her head, pulling her daughter closer._

_She thinks of when Clara was small and terrified of monsters in her room. She refused to sleep in her room by herself for a year. Her overactive imagination conjured something out of nothing and every lump or misshapen object became a monster in the dark. Hearing her daughter vulnerable and needy tugs at her heartstrings, further solidifying that her daughter is still just a girl despite her high IQ and her manner of speaking._

_“Of course my love, there’s nowhere I would rather be.”_

_Clara sleeps wrapped in her mother’s arms that night, unafraid of all the terrors out in the world, and unaware of the very threat that resides down the hall from her. She’s content and protected, snuggled in close to the person she loves most of all._

“I could smell her fear.” She learned at ten fear has a potent, very real smell. It’s strong and paralyzing. There was a metallic taste in her mouth as the acrid, bitter aroma reached her nasal passages. She froze when she neared the room as the scent intensified. It wasn’t anything she was familiar with and she didn’t know what was happening behind that door. “It made me sick.”

She threw up later after they had removed her. Someone held her hair as she emptied the contents of her stomach. They rubbed her back and gave her some water. She spent hours with her face pressed into that toilet, begging them all to rewind time, to make it better, to take away all of her pain and suffering.

“That’s one of my last memories of her. There was very real fear in her eyes as she screamed at me to run, pleaded with me to call the cops and to get away from my father.” Her father’s words echo in her head, the certainty on his face as he tried to grab her and force her into silence.

She sees her mother bleeding, the blood pouring out of her body, her lips white and stained with it, and the life draining from her as the seconds passed.

“Have you visited her?”

Claire startles at the unexpected question, completely thrown by it. She lays there silently. She wishes the answer was yes, but from the moment her plane touched down in England, she kept herself local to London. She is no longer the girl from Birmingham. She hasn’t stepped foot in the city in nearly two decades and the thought of doing so now, scares the living shit out of her. What is the point of visiting someone who is no longer there? It isn’t as if her mother will know, can hear her, so why should she go? She didn’t owe Julia anything after all this time and she worries about running into someone from her family.   
  


While no longer an orphan, a part of her remains the traumatised girl whose family didn’t want her. Because while her biological donor still lives and resides as a guest of her majesty, he is nothing to her. He died the day her mother did and he stopped mattering today her the day he killed a woman in Wiltshire.

“Your silence has given me the answer. I can’t say it’s surprised me if I’m being honest here.” Claire is predictable in her avoidance tactics and her mother was someone she knowingly chose to avoid. “Why?”

“She isn’t really there.” She answers as if it is obvious.

Dr. Roberts assumes there is more to it than that. In her time treating Claire, it is never as simple as that. Claire has a reason for doing everything she does. She did learn the woman has strong opinions about death and what happens after, but it isn’t directly tied to what keeps her from going back. “What’s the real reason?”

That is technically part of why she chooses not to visit her mother. “I only learned later where she was buried. My parents did some digging for me and passed on the information. They offered for years to bring me back and I steadfastly turned them down. I refused.” She is slightly ashamed of her over the top reaction when they first suggested returning to her former home to give her a chance to gain some closure on that time in her life, to reconnect with her roots. Claire wasn’t having it and told them she thought very little of Julia and how none of it mattered to her any longer. It was a bold lie and one she regretted immediately once it crossed her lips.  
  


Julia was an important part in her story. She was there for several chapters and helped her become the person she is in the present. While her contribution is minimal in comparison to the Nelsons, it doesn’t negate what they had or her role in the first decade of her life.

She continued to reject their offer over the years, citing one excuse after the other, eventually using medical school and her residency as justification. She wasn’t ready to face it all then, to accept it. If she’s honest with herself, she still isn’t. The idea of returning to the place that irrevocably changed her life, fundamentally changed who she was at her core, she doesn’t know how she can go back there to face her demons.

“Going back there means being Clara, being the little girl who was so scared she peed herself.” The warm liquid dripped down her legs as she backed away with tears falling down her face after inching open the door to find her father with a knife in his hands and his other tools hanging on the wall behind him. It was all taken into evidence when the police turned her childhood home into a crime scene. They tied the weapons to the different murders, confirming it was in fact her father who was responsible. “It means confronting things I left behind.”

Silence stretches between them as Claire has left her speechless. It isn’t the first time, nor does she believe it’ll be the last. She sets aside her notebook and observes Claire as she openly stares at the ceiling. She is lost in her own head and needs to be pulled back. “I want you to think about doing something. Let’s call it homework.” Claire lifts her head, her brows dipping low with confusion. “Consider taking a trip back to visit your mother.”

Instantly, she can see how Claire disagrees with her suggestion and wants to rebuke her for daring to mention it. Instead she bites down on her lip, pushing herself into an upright position with her eyes glazed over.

The first time Claire talked to her about that night, Dr. Roberts witnessed what it was that halted Claire from making progress, kept the nightmares coming back each night. It wasn’t exactly intentional, but she kept herself from finishing the memory of that night in her dreams. She woke up at the exact moment she descended the stairs and refused to go beyond that even in their sessions. Whatever occurred in that house in laymen’s terms ‘fucked’ her up.

It was as if she hadn’t fully accepted what happed the night her mother was murdered in front of her.

“If I agree to consider visiting, will you drop it?”

“Yes.”

“Fine.”

Forty minutes later when she enters her flat, her cat gliding through her legs, rubbing affectionately, she wonders if she should go. Twenty years and she hasn’t gone to see the place where they laid her mother’s body to rest. She knows her mother is somewhere else, her spirit free from the confines of her suffering and her life on earth. She is free to exist outside of it all. Her energy was returned to the universe that created her. After all, they are created from stardust, and like stars, they all have their end dates.

She lowers herself to scratch her black and white fluff ball’s head, depositing her bag and her keys in their rightful places. “How would you like to take a trip this weekend?” She has a few extra days she can cash in and favors she can exchange. Her cat meows and purrs as she scratches her chin. “I thought you would agree,” she laughs. She'll make the arrangements later and visit a flower shop. She can't show up empty handed after all these years. She has to do something, or else she'll feel useless and stupid. 

"Twenty years," she murmurs. Twenty years ago she interrupted her father and witnessed her mother die. She watched as they loaded her sister's unconscious form into an ambulance and drive off. Sometimes she thinks Poppy got the better end of the deal in the end. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It won't always be so bleak and depressing, but Claire is working through it. She spent years pretending to be normal. While being a doctor is a point of pride for her, it is also a way for her to make amends. She keeps track of the lives she saves. She wants desperately to do good in the world, the way she thought her father was.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Claire takes her therapist's advice and invites someone along for support.

_“I can be brave. I have to be brave.” She chanted to herself as she made her way to the stairs. Having grown up in the house all her life, she knew which steps to avoid if she didn’t want anyone to hear her. Their only phone was in their kitchen. _

_Her body froze mid-step as the voices cleared. They were still somewhat muffled, but she could hear her mum. “Please, don’t do th-” She was cut off. Clara strained to hear any other accompanying sounds, but there was nothing but the reigning silence. It was thick and dominating, causing her body to tremble as her feet finally touched down in the entry hall._

_She glanced around her surroundings with appraising eyes and ears ready to catch any noises. The house was dark with its’ dancing shadows. Clara decided her best option was to call the police for help. Every child was taught to dial for help in case of an emergency and in her esteemed ten year old opinion, this qualified as one. Her parents could forgive her later if it turned out she overreacted, but she was worried about what was transpiring somewhere in her house._

_With shaky limbs, she tiptoed to the kitchen, despite everything inside of her screaming at her to go back. If she went back to bed, perhaps she could convince herself it was all happening inside of her head. She squeezed her eyes shut, blocking at everything for a moment. She had to take action. _

_Her eyes were sharp and attentive as she glanced around her surroundings to determine if there were any dangers lurking. She wasn’t completely hopeless or stupid, and she had watched far too much television and X-Files to know that someone simply doesn’t go running into danger without any consequences. She had to be smart about this if she was going to be of use. She frozen at the sound of the floor creaking, her eyes flickering down the hall. There was no one._

_She felt the erratic racing of her heart as she craned her head to check for the presence of anyone in the kitchen. Clara heaved a shuddering sigh upon realizing she was alone. While being alone frightened her and she didn’t like the idea of someone potentially sneaking up on her, there was no one who could save her family if she didn’t make the call. She reached up to grab the phone off the hook, her fingers pushing the number that had been drilled into her._

_“Police, what’s your emergency?” A spark of relief settled in her for the first time all night. Maybe they’ll all get out of this relatively unscathed. She silently prayed it wasn't the psycho who killed all those girls and women._

_“There’s someone in my house.” She whispered into the receiver, the phone tightly clutched in her hand, her entire body shaking uncontrollably as she tries to rein in her emotions. Her eyes continued to dart around the room, waiting for someone to snatch it away from her._

_“Are you sure there’s an intruder?”_

_Normally, Clara would find herself insulted by the patronizing tone. While she is a child, it doesn’t mean she’s prone to fits of fancy and an overactive imagination._

_“Yes,” she hissed, anger coming through in her voice. “I heard my mum cry out and beg someone not to do it, and I don’t know where my sister is.” The tears were back and she attempts not to let the clog her throat._

_“Okay, hold on, I’m going to send someone to your house. Do you know your address?”_

_She rattled off her address without a thought when a loud scream pierces the silence. “What was that?” She heard the operator question, but she has already dropped the phone, her feet rushing towards her mother._

_“Claire?” She frowned at the voice. “Claire? Please wake up.”_

Her eyes snap open and she takes a moment to calm her breathing. Blood rushes through her ears as she orients herself with the world of the living and escapes her dreams. She smiles wanly and pushes herself out of bed. She wants to forget about all of it. Claire grabs her belongings and rushes into the bathroom to give herself more time to run away. She goes through the motions of getting ready and when she’s done, sits on the toilet staring blankly at the wall, lost in her thoughts. 

There’s a knock, followed by a voice. “Are you ready to go honey?”

Claire’s eyes lift up to meet the kindest, most welcoming hazel eyes in the whole universe. Her mother smiles softly at her, smoothing back some of her loose waves. She melts into her touch, wishing they could stay hidden in the confines of their hotel room, alas that would defeat the purpose of their trip. Kathy didn’t fly halfway across the world to hang out in a hotel. She came to support Claire the way she always has from the moment she entered her custody nearly twenty years ago.

She offers her hand to her daughter, which Claire takes with a sigh. Her therapist as much as it pains her to admit was right about her refusal to visit her mother’s grave. She has to go at least once in her life, to try and sort through the mess that is her childhood, and find some closure for the girl she was. That little girl never got the answers she desired and Claire is aware visiting a grave of someone long gone won’t change that, but she feels it might help to finally accept what happened to her.

The mother and daughter slide into the waiting car. Claire clutches her mother’s hand. Her mother’s touch is the only thing keeping her going. Without her there, she would’ve found some excuse to avoid going back to her hometown.

As she watches outside the window, much of it is the same. There are updates here and there, but it isn’t unrecognizable the way she hoped. She remembers shops she frequented with her parents, streets she strolled with her hand intertwined with Poppy’s. They pass by her old school and it takes all Claire has in her to keep her eyes fixated on the old building. Poppy was out of school before her, and she would wait outside the gate for her so they could walk home together, the way their mother wanted.

Luckily, their route to the cemetery where her mother is buried avoids her old street where she knows the house she lived in as a child still stands. She refuses to look at the road that would take her there. Too many memories threaten to swallow her whole and she’s barely hanging on at this point.

If she turns back now, she’ll never do it. She is certain of it. The car pulls up to the entrance of the cemetery and they thank their driver with a nice tip. Claire decided she wanted to walk there to give herself time to think and reflect upon this momentous occasion. She’s in Birmingham. She was born in London, but her parents moved here shortly after her birth. Her father was offered a new job and her parents decided it would be a new start for their family.

“It’s funny,” her mother says as they begin their stroll. “When I was a kid I thought all English people spoke in an uppity, posh accent.”

Claire laughs, understanding immediately what the other woman is doing. She silently thanks her for it. 

“Everyone does.” She thought something similar about Americans before she moved. “Here in Birmingham, the dialect is called Brummie. Most people who aren’t from around here would never be able to tell the difference between all the accents.” Surprisingly after all the years away, she still possesses the ability to distinguish them. There’s something subtle in the way they talked. She doesn’t sound very English herself after all her time in America. She has a transatlantic accent after living in England and on the east coast. There are some pronunciations that lingered and she has fallen back into some of her familiar speech, but overall, she sounds distinctly American. “It’s like at home. Most people think the American accent in general is the same.” Home is her parents’ house on Long Island.

Her family took a road trip her first summer in the States and she had a major culture shock after being exposed to the different regions of her new home. Most of the people on the American shows she did watch sounded very similar and even a lot of Canadians sounded American to her.

Kathy bumps her shoulder against Claire’s. “I remember going through the different boroughs with you those first couple of weeks. You were surprised to hear so many different accents.”

Claire’s lips tilt up in a smile when she thinks of those early weeks in New York. Everything was busier and bigger and just different. It took her a while to adjust to her new surroundings and to stop getting lost. She attended a private school on Manhattan, requiring her to get up early each day to catch the train into the city. She sometimes finds herself missing it.

London is a fast paced city and there are millions residing within it, but it barely measures against New York in her opinion. She doesn’t feel at home and has considered several times returning at the end of her contract with the hospital.

“It seems like forever ago.” Sixteen years ago she boarded a plane for another continent and didn’t look back. “Do you think…” she licks her lips.

Kathy recognizes it as a nervous tick. Claire has a lot of those and she had to familiarize herself with them. “Do I think what sweetheart?” There was a learning curve when she and her husband took Claire into their home. If she didn’t prompt Claire to finish her question, the girl left it unspoken. Sometimes she needed pushing and others, Kathy had to back off.

Claire keeps her eyes focused on the path, following the directions the attendant on the phone gave them. “Do you think my family- the people who didn’t want me, my biological family, do you think they ever think of me?”

The mother wants to wrap her arms around her daughter and hold onto her forever. Realistically, it would go over poorly as Claire would view it as her avoiding the difficult to answer question. She has plenty of words about her daughter’s biological family and none of them are kind, and she refuses to bad mouth people she hasn’t met.

Claire’s face sours as if reading her mother’s mind. “It was a stupid question anyway.”

“No, it wasn’t.” She grabs the younger woman’s arm when she tries to walk away. They’ve had conversations about Claire’s stalking off in the past. “I assume they would think about you. It is hard not to.” She cradles her daughter’s face, staring into a face that’s as familiar as her own. She sees traces of the eleven year old who moved into her home expecting to be gone within a few weeks. Claire’s attempts at masking her feelings rarely worked. “What they did after everything, that’s on them.”

Abandonment was a word tossed around during therapy. As much as Kathy and Tom welcomed her and made her a member a part of their family, a part of Claire will forever remain the ten year old no one wanted including her biological family. It stung when she had come upon that realization. She didn’t want that for her.

“They didn’t deserve you if they couldn’t see that you’re nothing- nothing at all like that monster.” She has to emphasize her words. Claire has practice at blocking her out and has selective hearing. “You’re amazing, intelligent, stubborn, passionate, funny when you want to be, and you’re incredibly loving. You care more than you let on.”

Claire’s gaze drifts away, unable to meet her mother’s any longer. Compliments make her feel funny and cause her stomach to roll. “You’re my mom.”

Kathy rolls her eyes at the tired statement. “I don’t have to tell you that because I’m your mom. I could tell you that you’re angsty, posses a nasty temper, refuse to listen when someone is trying to help you, and you have terrible social skills.”

“Thanks,” she replies dryly. They aren’t things her mother hasn’t already expressed to her.

“That’s the first time I’ve heard mom instead of mum in a while.”

The younger woman blushes. “I hear some variation of mum all day long. It’s gotten stuck in my head.”

They settle into a content silence, continuing their journey to Julia’s grave. Claire sags her shoulders in relief as they near the headstone as there is no one around. Her mother’s death date isn’t for another day, but there was a minimal chance of one of her estranged relatives being there.

“Can you give me a few minutes?”

Her mother strokes her cheek, understanding brightening in her eyes. That is Kathy. She is understanding. She rarely takes anything personally and she’s there for her even in the moments she didn’t deserve it. She can admit she was a shit in her teens and raised a lot of hell at home. She has issued several apologies since to the two people who raised and loved her, but it’s never felt enough. “Go on, I think she’s been waiting for you.”

She furrows her brow at the words and turns away to approach the grave. Claire lowers herself into a kneeling position, brushing her fingers across her mother’s name. They didn’t include her married one, and she thinks for a good reason. People were bound to defile it if they made the connection between Julia and Henry.

Her mother’s family are proud Italians who migrated half a century or so ago before her mother was born. Julia Ciccone was the first of her family to be born in England on July 10, 1968, twenty-one years prior to her sisters’ birth.

She catches sight of the other grave, the one that’s been here longer than her mother. Her sister Rosalia died when Claire was seven. She and Poppy were twins. With a start, she realizes the stone is a different one than the one placed there after her sister passed. They removed the Beauchamp from her marker. It seemed they were cleaning house of anything tying her mother and her children to Henry including her.

“Hi mum,” her voice is hollow. For all of the planning she’s done to make the trip, she hasn’t found any words to say.

She lays the carefully selected flowers down, white carnations for remembrance. She spent a few hours agonizing over it and her mother had to calm her down, remind her that the flowers held more significance for her than the person she was leaving them for. For her sister, she leaves daisies. Her mother wasn’t the only reason she avoided this place like the plague.

Losing her sister changed something in the dynamic between her parents, within the whole family really. Poppy was closed off and less willing to indulge her younger sister. She tried and she maintained an aura of positivity, but she was left changed from the experience of watching the light and life fade from her twin.

Sometimes Claire wonders if her sister’s death is the catalyst, the initial spark for her father’s heinous, unforgivable, purely evil actions. It was a year after her death when he started taking those trips, which she came to discover some of them were so he could scout his victims. He ran surveillance on them, tracked their every move, documented their routines in his notebook in preparation for him to remove them permanently from their lives.

One of the victims, a Laoghaire Mackenzie was his very first and ten years old, running errands for her mother in town when Henry kidnapped her. He sodomized her, brutalized her, and left her in a field resembling a broken doll. Her death was gruesome and made headline news all the way in Birmingham, despite her living a few hours outside Inverness and in a different country.

She bore a remarkable resemblance to Rosalia like Claire had to Emily.

Perhaps that was why he made her mother his last. Poppy and Rosalia looked the most like her, while Claire was a mix of his side and her mother’s. She remembers the way he broke after her sister died. He was snappish and colder than the father she had come to know. He was assertive and demanding with a touch of overprotectiveness thrown in.

“I’m sorry I haven’t come sooner.” She regrets her lack of visits over the years. It wasn’t supposed to last this long, and it wasn’t anything personal against them. “I didn’t know how- how to,” her eyes fill with tears as she loses her composure for the second time that day. Saying goodbye is a foreign concept to her. Everyone she loved left her abruptly. There were no heartfelt goodbyes and promises to carry on in their absence as they consoled her. They were there one day and gone the next, their lives snuffed out. She wipes away her tears with the back of her hand. “I was adopted by an amazing family. They gave me a home when I was desperately in need of one. No one wanted me.” She chews on her lip.

“Visiting you is a huge step for me. I am sorry for not coming before now, but I wasn’t ready then. I don’t think you’re ever really ready to embrace death and loss, or to come back to the place that represents all of that..” She plops onto the hard ground, thankful for her coat providing a barrier between her and the dewy grass. “I was and still am haunted by the last time I saw you. There was so much blood everywhere.”

The floor, her parents, and her sister were covered in it. The splatters on the wall had her gasping in horror. She hadn’t seen that much in her life outside of television. Her first reaction was to panic, her mouth open in a silent scream. She stumbled backward, knocking over the vase on the side table. The sound of it shattering ricocheted throughout the house, disturbing the all consuming silence, and bringing her father’s attention to her. The way he turned his murderous gaze on her chilled her, left her petrified, trembling in fear as he began to stalk towards her.

Her mother weak with blood loss interfered inadvertently saving her at the cost of her own life.

Her stomach churns with guilt as her memories threaten to draw her back. “I don’t understand why you did it.” By the time the police and paramedics arrived on the scene, there was nothing to be done about her mother. She saw their faces when they loaded the bodied bag and she tried to break free of the officer restraining her.

Claire hid in the hall closet as her father searched for her after he finished with her mother. The blood splatters on his face and his red stained hands as he finally found her caused her to pee herself. Her body shook as she tried to maintain a brave face. He was going to kill her. She was going to die without having a chance to live. She met his eyes, cold and dark, calculating as he caught her fearless gaze.

His lips tugged as he snatched her arm, dragging her back to the room of horrors.

She shakes her head, blocking out the rest. She refuses. “I stopped being a Catholic. You would be disappointed.” Her mother dragged them to mass at least once a week. Poppy was preparing for her confirmation into the Church, while Claire battled with her doubts. She had gone through with her first communion full of faith and trust in God’s plan. That changed when her sister died. She couldn’t reconcile a benevolent God with the one who took Rosalia away. She continued attending services for her mother’s benefit.

“These days I’m more spiritual, although I do like a lot of Eastern thoughts about death.” She spent her free time researching other beliefs in her quest to accept the inevitability and tragedy of death. “I like to think that you’ve become part of the universe again. Did you know we are made of the same elements as stars? We’re like stars in a way. We get to burn for a time until we dim and fade out, rejoining the universe, the place that birthed us.”

She pauses as she catches up with the thoughts whirring in her head. “Life asked Death why people feared Death. Death replied that Life was a beautiful lie, while Death is a painful truth.” Death was full of many unknowns and the hardest to accept, while Life there were possibilities at every turn. People believe they have all the time in the world to live when in reality, their number could be up any second. All humans walk towards their death daily. Life was familiar and Death was the one thing people couldn't prepare for. “We all die at some point and it’s harder on the people we leave behind. There are so many things I never got to say to you. I didn’t have the time I thought we would have.”

That is the crux of it all. There are many questions from her childhood that are left unanswered. Did her mother know she was married to a monster? Had she suspected he was a sadistic murderer? Did she regret saving her at the cost of her own life?

“I can comfort myself knowing Rosie isn’t alone, but you left me alone.” She cries, tears spilling down her cheeks. “I had no one for a long time.” Her sight is blurred as she grapples with her feelings. “The trial was…” she shudders when she thinks of that nightmare. “They all blamed me. People thought me a monster like him.” His last taunt echoes once again in her ears. “I blame me too.” If she had noticed something was wrong quicker, she could’ve saved her mother and sister from their fates. “It’s all my fault.”

“No, it isn’t.” Claire balks at her mother’s firm interruption. Kathy kneels besides her and gazes sympathetically at her. “You were a child. You couldn’t have known what was going to happen.”

Claire desperately wants to believe her, more than anything she wishes she could, but her mom wasn’t there that night. She doesn’t know.

“So this is your mum?” Claire’s lips quirk up at the distinction. “Introduce me?”

She laughs at the lightheartedness. She can’t really introduce her to the other woman, but that’s not the point. “Well mom, this is my birth mum Julia.” She gestures between the flesh body that raised her to the headstone representing the woman who birthed her. They were the two women who made her who she is. “She liked when it rained.” It rained a lot, after all it was England. “Sometimes if it was warm enough, we danced in our back garden, completely drenched but there were so many laughs. Our feet were all muddy and sometimes our clothes. She didn't care.”

“Tell me more,” Kathy requests, hungry to hear about the life Claire doesn’t mention. She sees a different side of her, a reflection of the little girl who didn’t shy away from a touch or terrify her parents with her endless screams.

Claire leans her head onto her mother’s shoulder, seeking the solace only the other woman can give her. “She would’ve liked you.” Claire doesn’t say it, but they would’ve never met. “She would comfort me like you do when I was scared out of mind. Thunderstorms woke me and sent me running into her bedroom. She forced me into ballet. She thought I needed to make some friends.”

She made a big production about having to attend classes. Dancing was the last thing she wanted and yet her mother was forcing her into it. “It wasn’t that bad. I did it for five years, but after she died, I didn’t want to dance again.” Dancing reminded her of her mother and simpler times before everything about her was complicated and draped in secrecy. “That’s my sister Rosalia.” She points at the other gravestone. “She and I were closer than Poppy and I.”

Kathy’s heart clenches when she reads the death date and does the math. Eight years old wasn’t a long time to live at all. “You’ve never talked about her.”

Claire is ashamed of that fact. If anyone deserved to be remembered, it was her older sister. “She was the mediator between Poppy and I. Poppy, we were very different, contrasting personalities, like Yin and Yang, but we fought all the time. Rosalia, she was content with where she was. She didn’t compete with us. It was a pissing match between Poppy and I for a long time.”

As they grew, the unnecessary tension between them faded somewhat. They accepted their interests didn’t align and their differences weren’t barriers. At least, Clara felt that way. Poppy was hard to decipher, but she likes to imagine that her sister didn’t despise her.

“So, what’s the story behind your names?” Kathy can’t figure out how Claire’s biological parents named their children. They’re all so different.

The younger woman chuckles, for once having a response to a question. She doesn’t feel the need to impede her mother’s curiosity, a rarity. “If you can’t tell, my mother was Italian.” Kathy shoots her a look. “Yeah, yeah don’t be a smartass and watch my language.” She rolls her eyes playfully. “My mum had a thing for flowers, but she didn’t want Rosie to just be Rose. She wanted to honor her Italian heritage. Poppy was just very English.” Claire laughs when she recalls her mother explaining it to the three of them. “She did like poppies. They were her favorite flower and she wanted to continue with the flower theme since they were twins. As for me, my real name is Clara.” She thinks even with all of the time that has elapsed and the official documentation declaring otherwise, her name will always be Clara.

“Also Italian and well a bunch of other languages. She said she thought I was going to be bright. She looked at me and when I opened my eyes the first time, they were so clear. She considered the French variation for my- for his side,” she mutters darkly, eyes flashing. “But he agreed I looked like a Clara.”

It’s the first time in years, her birth name doesn’t bother her. There isn’t the familiar ache serving as a reminder of why she changed it and embraced an identity as someone else.

“You know,” Kathy says, brushing back loose tendrils. “I liked your name. Clara is lovely. I understood your reasons for choosing Claire.” Who hasn’t wanted to escape their to life and become someone else? For most people, it is impossible, but her daughter had a rare opportunity. “I love you whether your name is Clara or Claire. They’re both you.”

“I felt like I was doing a disservice to her when I changed it, but Clara was also the name she picked for me. How could I be Clara when I failed her?”

Words fail her. There are none she can use to convince her despondent child that she wasn’t at fault. Claire has to accept it for herself. “You’re still Clara. A name doesn’t define you. At your core, deep in your soul, you’re the same person you always were. She would be beyond proud to know the woman you’ve grown into. I am.”

“How do you do that?”

Her forehead crinkles, confusion reflecting in her eyes. “Do what?”

“Know when to say the right words.”

“I’ve had a lot of practice with you, your sister, and your brother.”

“You’re pretty incredible too mom. You took in three broken children who no one wanted and made us feel special because you chose us.”

“Hey!” She grabs Claire’s chin and turns her head. “You aren’t broken. You never were. You don’t have to believe me at this very moment, but I hope one day you will. The three of you were dealt some rough hands and life wasn’t fair the way it should’ve been, but you’re all amazing and resilient. You made something out of yourselves and that’s all I can ask for as your mother. So I don’t want to hear that sort of language used in reference to any of my children ever again, do you understand?”

Thoroughly reprimanded at thirty, Claire wisely nods her head. She isn’t dumb, nor does she have a death wish. Her mother’s fury is one thing she would rather avoid for the rest of her life if she could. Being a traumatized child worked for a time until it didn’t. When the wrath of Kathy was unleashed upon her at thirteen, her first thought was that they were going to call off the adoption and send her back for being a problem child. It took a long time and constant reassurances that they were in it for the long haul.

“Come on, I think you’ve said your piece for today. Maybe you’ll come back, maybe you won’t, but let’s go get some breakfast.”

“I love you. I don’t want you to think you’re playing second fiddle to a ghost. I love her too, but she’s the memory of a girl.”

Kathy kisses Claire’s head, her lips soft and familiar, and she feels the rush of comfort she associates with her. “I didn’t think that, but thank you for saying it all the same. Now up we get,” Claire helps her mother into a standing position.

She faces the headstones again. “I hope she misses me wherever she is.”

“There’s not a doubt in my mind that she does. You're her child. Death doesn't negate that.”

“Bye mum, bye Rosie,” she chokes back a sob on the last syllable. She pivots on her heels, sliding a little in the grass, turning her back to them. She can’t look back just like the day they buried her sister. “There was that cute cafe near our hotel. I really just want some seriously strong coffee.” They begin their trek towards the entrance.

“You have a caffeine addiction. I’m surprised you don’t have a drip attached to you at all times.”

She makes a face at her mother when she thinks the woman isn’t looking.

“I saw that.”

“I’m not addicted.”

Kathy snorts. “Claire, you were guzzling it by the pot in college, medical school, and your residency.” So perhaps it isn’t a gross exaggeration and she does experience the symptoms of withdrawal when she goes too long without her own personal ambrosia, but she blames her mother for introducing her to the rich substance.

“I don’t know what you’re talking abo-“

“Clara?” She stops short and freezes when she hears her name, feeling like a little girl all over again. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't worry, Jamie will be figuring back into the story very shortly.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter delves a little more into Claire's past and we finally find out who the mystery person is.

She freezes, memories long forgotten, stuffed into the deep recesses of her mind, flutter to the surface.

_She’s six. Her parents are at the hospital with her sister again. Poppy is with them, refusing to be parted from her twin. She threw a tantrum, surprising all of them given Poppy’s generally calm disposition. Her quick shift in temperament forced their parents’ hand._

_Clara is left with her neighbor, one of her favorite people in the world. She is kindly and not too much older than her parents, and spoils Clara endlessly with treats and knowledge. She permits her to assist her in the kitchen and she loves it. Mrs. Galanis doesn’t treat her like she’s some stupid child and talks to her like she’s a grown up. She likes that. She introduced Clara to Greek works and other forms of literature, cultivating and inspiring a lifelong love of reading._

_The little girl knits her brows together. “Mrs. Galanis?” She asks, her voice soft and barely heard over the radio playing in the background._

_“Yes, agapOUla mou?” Clara loves when she calls her that._

_A grin nearly splits her face. “Do you have a first name?” She frowns when the woman laughs at her. She doesn’t think what she’s said is funny in the least. She hasn’t heard anyone refer to the woman as anything other than Mrs. Galanis. She is curious and needs her curiosity sated._

_“Everyone does.”_

_“What is yours? You know mine.”_

_“Ophelia,” Mrs. Galanis answers her._

_“Like in Hamlet?” She has worked her way to Shakespeare, although she considers him vastly overrated in comparison to some other playwrights. “That’s a good name.” She repeats her name, tastes the syllables on her tongue. It’s soft and pretty like the woman mixing their ingredients next to her. “So why are we making tiropita?” They don’t make the dish often, only when Mrs. Galanis has company for dinner._

_Clara looks forward to it. She discovered a deep love of feta when her parents started leaving her here almost a year ago. Her face is practically pressed to the oven when she smells the melting cheeses in the oven, mouth salivating._

_The light haired girl looks up at her neighbor and her brows carefully contract. There are a lot of different emotions flashing across her face and one in her eyes, she’s unfamiliar with. Her stomach turns uncomfortably as a deep sense of worry and fear overwhelm her. A lot of people have been looking at her like that recently and she knows it can’t mean anything good with Rosalia in the hospital._

_Aunts and uncles have visited and they have worn the same sad expression, the one that says she needs to brace herself for what’s coming. Rosalia has only come home twice since she first received her diagnosis, not that Clara understands terms like cancer and experimental treatments. She’s bright and beyond her schoolmates, but she’s still six._

_Her family have conversations in hushed whispers, silencing themselves whenever she and Poppy are around. Poppy has grown distant and moody, secluding herself in her shared bedroom with Rosalia. Clara no longer enters the room, unable to stop herself from crying when she sees the pristine sheets, stacks of unread books, and toys that haven’t been played with since before Christmas. It can’t mean good things if her sister lives at the hospital with all of those wires and tubes attached to her._

_The last time she saw her a month ago, she became too distressed at the sight of her sister with no hair, none at all. Those pale, barely seen eyebrows were gone. Her long hair was gone. Her bright eyes were dull and lifeless until she and Poppy entered and she looked tiny and alone. Clara backed out of the room, refusing to enter when her parents tried to force the issue. She couldn’t watch her sister like that. That wasn’t her Rosie._

_“My sister is going to die, isn’t she?” Clara is almost seven. Her birthday is two days away, not that anyone in her family has kept track. She bites her quivering lip and closes her eyes, turning away from Mrs. Galanis._

_The woman draws her into her comforting warmth, holding the shaking girl as she unleashes everything she’s held inside for the last year. She has tried so hard to be strong for her family, to be there for Poppy, to do well in year one, and to keep her head up with all of the uncertainty brewing around her._

_Her parents aren’t the same. This time last year, they were preparing for her sixth birthday. It was a superhero tea party. Poppy told her it was a dumb idea, but Rosie said it was awesome. It would be like having two parties in one and she would much rather take Rosie’s word any day over Poppy’s. This year, it was like she barely existed to them. When they weren’t working, they were at the hospital at all hours. Clara stopped going home after school and went straight to her neighbor instead, preferring her company over anyone else’s._

_“I’m sorry,” the woman whispers thickly, burying her face in Clara’s golden mane._

_Gut wrenching sobs pull from her body as she chokes on her tears. Her other favorite person is going to leave her. She doesn’t know anyone who has died but she will. She pulls back, face blotchy, nose red and runny, and eyes watery and clouded. “How long?”_

_“The doctors don’t know. It could happen any time.”_

_Clara nods her head, having suspected this would be the answer. “This is for me?” Mrs. Galanis says food is about comfort and always makes her favorites when she’s had a bad day._

_“Oh my little angel, I wish I could save you from this pain.” Clara wishes she could stop it. It feels as if her heart is being ripped from her chest and she’s losing her best friend, someone who has been there since she could remember. She can’t remember a moment where Rosie wasn’t there by her side. What is she going to do without her? Who will comfort her when she has nightmares? Who will play all of her silly, make believe games?_

_She drops her arms and steps back. “Can we take some t-to R-rosie?” She hasn’t cooked for her sister and now that she’s aware her time is limited, she wants to share this with her, to give her something for all she has given her._

_“We can.”_

_Together they work on filling the dough and rolling the pastry into little triangles. When the mixture is gone, Clara opens the oven and closes it after the trays are slid inside._

_“What would you like to do now, Matakia mou?”_

_She shrugs her shoulders. Normally, the familiar Greek pet names bring joy and comfort to her, but her whole world has been upended in an hour and she doesn’t know what to do. “Can we read?” Reading will help her mind escape and she won’t have to think about her sister or the shifting tides in her parents’ marriage._

Claire blinks, eyes refocusing before she’s suddenly drowning in another memory.

_The social worker won’t let her leave the hospital. They want her checked out and a full psychological evaluation. She hasn’t spoken a single word or made a sound in the aftermath of last week’s events. She just stares straight ahead, eyes unseeing of her environment. She has lost track of the passing time and everything has blurred around her._

_No one has told her what’s become of her family, where her father is, her sister, and her mother. She doesn’t know if someone has cleaned her house, wiped away the spatters of blood, the spot where it pooled from her mother’s abdomen, and she can’t bring herself to think of her sister. As much as she and Poppy rarely got on, she was her sister and did her best to fill in for their departed sister. She envies Rosalia for leaving when she did._

_They’ve provided her a room to herself and changed her out of her soiled pajamas after transferring her into the care of the hospital. She didn’t react. Her eyes remained wide and blank. She has retreated to the safety of her mind, hiding from the horrors of that night. She doesn’t want to think about it ever again. She can’t. She fears she is broken. She has gone to a place that is happy, where there are no monsters living down the hall and endless screaming, and above all unanswered prayers._

_No one has come to talk to her in some time. She vaguely heard something about the press and police, but she tuned it all out the moment they buckled her into the police car. In her mind, she’s safe and protected. They can’t hurt her. He can’t hurt her. She is free but not free._

_The door opens. She continues to sit, still as a statue. There are no outward signs she is present and able to comprehend what is happening around her._

_“Matakia mou,” she almost starts, a spark appears in her eyes before dimming like a dying ember. “Look at you,” the woman comes forward, seating herself on the end of the bed. Her sea blue eyes are full of compassion and love, none of which Clara deserves. She is tentative as she reaches forward to grasp the little girl’s hand._

_Clara flinches back, shocked by the turn of events. Never before has she shied away from her neighbor’s touch. She is tactile and enjoys the touch of those she feels safe with, but she is changed after everything, morphed her into someone else after what her father did. Terrified by the sudden movement, she reacts jerkily. Her arms wrap around her knees as she rocks back and forth, consciousness retreating farther and father into the depths of her mind._

_Mrs. Galanis freezes. Her little Clara isn’t here. She is somewhere else. “I wish I could take you home with me. I tried. Your family has blocked me.”_

_Part of Clara registers the words being spoken to her. She wants to frown at the mention of her family. None of them have made an appearance. She is alone all the time. She suffers through her nightmares, waking when the nurses come in to administer a sedative to stop her thrashing and screaming. Her screams reduce to whimpers and then she is silent once more._

_“I was able to arrange this meeting. I wanted to check on you.”_

_There is still nothing from the little blonde girl, no flickering of her eyes or facial twitches. She doesn’t fidget and it is unnerving to witness someone as full of life as Clara reduced to this. “I know whatever happened that night has scared you and that’s okay. You’re allowed to be scared and to hide.” She pauses for a moment to watch Clara. “You went through an ordeal the rest of us can only imagine and it won’t come close to what transpired. You’re brave and strong and you’re going to get through this. It is fine if you wish to hide from the world. No one would blame you.”_

_Clara doesn’t know about that. Some of the staff and her social worker are frustrated with her silence. The police wish to interview her for her version of the events of that night. The evidence against her father is damning, but outside of her and her father, no one knows what happened in that house. She hardly has the full story, having spent much of the night in her bed until that last hour or so when everything changed. She can only tell them what she witnessed and she doesn’t want to remember that. She can’t think of the fading light in her mother’s eyes, the way she begged her to survive._

_She had interrupted his carefully laid plans and he decided to teach her a lesson about what happened when children stuck their noses where they didn’t belong. There’s a row of perfect stitches lining her side from where he sliced her. They hadn’t known about it at first. Her nightgown was soaked in blood and she hadn’t said anything to contradict their assumptions. They assumed it was all her mother’s and she allowed them to believe it. She nearly bled out, wishing for Death to take her away like Rosie._

_Clara had other injuries, a few fractured bones from when he dragged her out of the closet. Her ribs were bruised from when he threw into the wall, laughing coldly when she tumbled to the floor, scrambling on her hands and knees to escape as he stalked closer. Eyes wide in fear and tears trailing down her face, she tried to get away. Her muscles ached and she was tired. And then he took out the knife, whispered how he had dreamed of teaching her his ways, but she had gone and ruined his plan._

_Poppy lay unconscious, bleeding profusely, and Clara kept her focus on the man in front of her. He was transformed before her. Gone was her loving daddy and in his place was something else entirely. Parents had told their children stories about the boogeyman, but they never said what to do when the boogeyman was your father._

_“Please,” she begs, more tears slipping from her eyes. “Don’t hurt me. I’ll do whatever you want.” She attempts to move back, hands slipping in her own blood. She had cut her hands when the glass panels on his shelves broke._

_He tsks. His head tilts as he considers her, gaze running the length of her body as assesses her. He shakes his head. “Oh little Clara, you and I, we could’ve been a team.” Pity and disappointment seeps into his voice. “You’re just like me.”_

_She screams at him. “NO!!! NO!!!” She twists her head away and refuses to look at him any longer. She isn’t like him. She can’t be. If she is, then she’s a monster too._

_“Yes,” he grins, a dangerous glint in his eyes. “We are the same you and I.” She cries harder. “Both smarter than everyone around us. Both of us loved Rosie and were destroyed when we lost her.” He loses his composure for a second. “I could teach you. Your mother is right there. You could be like me, father and daughter.”_

_“This isn’t happening. I’m dreaming.” She chants to herself. “Close your eyes Clara. Close your eyes. You’ll be back in your bed.”_

_There is that laugh again, cold, lacking any of the warmth she associated with him. He forces her up, yanking her over to her mother, pressing the knife into her hand. “Go on Clara, you know yo-“ She pees herself again and cries harder._

_She tries to convince herself it is one bad dream when he smacks her to the floor. “Clara, you haven’t wet yourself since you were four. I am extremely disappointed in you.” She wants to tell him good, but he is in control, not her. “You’re going to watch and next time, you’ll do it yourself. Do you understand? If you look away, I’ll make it worse.”_

_Clara shakes her head to bring herself back to the present. She got away. She isn’t near him anymore. She doesn’t have to see him. He is gone. Tears fall as her body shakes, unable to contain everything she’s carefully hidden away. She has lost everything._

_Mrs. Galanis doesn’t touch her young neighbor instead keeping her distance. She hums the same lullaby from when Clara stayed the night as a child._

_Κοιμήσου και σαν σηκωθής κάτι θα σου χαρίσω,_

_την Πόλη και τη Βενετιά τη Χιό με τα καράβια,_

_να γίνης άντρας 'ξακουστός σ' Άνατολή και Δύση,_

_καβάλλα στην Άγιά Σοφιά να πας να προσκυνήσης._

_Clara halts her movements and feels herself going under. Her eyelids flutter and her body falls back, sinking into the bed as she falls under the magic spell of sleep. “Oh mikró mou astéri,” Mrs. Galanis murmurs, tucking the blanket around her former charge. In her sleep, the horrors are washed away and she sees the innocence radiating off her little star. “You’re going to find your way. I promise.” She presses her lips to the crown of Clara’s head. “I hope to see you again.”_

“Clara?”

She halts and stares at the woman before her, the one who occupied so many of her happy memories. Her eyes are the same sea blue and her dark hair flows around her in gentle waves. By Claire’s estimate, she’s somewhere in her fifties.

She feels her mother’s eyes on her, but she can’t look away from her former neighbor. Until now, she hadn’t thought about her in a long time. She tucked away those memories along with the rest of her young childhood and buried them in her mind, preventing them from resurfacing. She couldn’t deal with them.

“M-Mrs. G-G-Galanis?” She can’t believe it is her after all this time.

Those sea blue eyes light and sparkle with the knowledge that it is in fact Clara. “It is you.”

She nods her head. “Uh yes, except it is Claire now.”

“Oh.”

Claire tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, suddenly nervous at this unexpected meeting. She hasn’t seen this woman in twenty years. The last time was when she was a distressed, traumatized child trapped within the confines of her mind. “This is my mom, adopted mom Kathy,” she introduces the two women. “Mom, this is my old neighbor Mrs. Galanis. I used to spend a lot of time at her house.”

The two exchange pleasantries.

“Is this your first time here?”

“Yes.”

“Do you live nearby?”

She shakes her head. “I’m currently living in London. But I spent the rest of my adolescence in America.” It is surreal for her to be standing with the woman she considered a mother figure, someone who saw her at her worst, and kept her company until she couldn’t. “I came back a couple of years ago, but I haven’t decided if I’ll stay or not.”

Mrs. Galanis’ face softens. She can’t blame the younger woman for being hesitant to return to the place of so many tragedies. “I tried to find you, but you had disappeared after the trial and the endless appeals.”

“My parents adopted me and we formally changed my name. It was easier and kept people from harassing me. The last name Beauchamp doesn’t inspire confidence or safety, and I needed to start somewhere fresh.”

“Would it be possible for us to meet?”

Fear trickles down her spine and her hand tightens around her mother’s. Mrs. Galanis notices immediately and is quick to calm her. “I don’t live there any longer. I moved a few years after. It wasn’t quite the same, you know.”

“I’m sorry,” Claire apologizes. “I don’t think I could handle ever seeing that house again. Well, we are in town for the rest of today and then tomorrow we have train tickets to head back. I have work.” She shrugs.

“Here I’ll give you my number, and you can contact me if it’s possible. I would love to know how everything turned out for you mikró mou astéri.”

Claire’s smile is watery. No one has called her that in twenty years. “Yes, I would like that too.” She takes the slip of paper and says goodbye.

Mrs. Galanis continues on her way and Claire and her mother make their way to the exit. “What is it she called you?”

“My little star in Greek. She had a lot of little pet names for me like my little love or my little eyes. When my sister got sick, they needed someone to watch me and even later, I bypassed my house and went straight for hers. We would cook and read together. She was teaching me Greek. I can’t remember any of it now, but back then she was the best part of my day when the rest of my life sucked.”

Her mom wraps an arm around her. “I’m glad you had someone there for you. She seems like a sweet woman.”

“She is. She came to visit me in the hospital and sang the sleep lullaby. She did it to help me.I wasn’t coping very well in those first few weeks.”

Kathy finds herself immensely thankful for the other woman. The people who were part of her daughter’s life before she knew her had failed her in the worst ways possible. They hadn’t cared about the little girl who’s entire life was upended and thought about themselves instead, abandoning the young child to the system and hoping she would become someone else’s problem.

She kisses Claire’s temple. “We’ll treat her to dinner.”

Claire laughs. Her mother has no idea how Mrs. Galanis will somehow convince them to let her pay for the meal, recalling how she tried to pay for an ice cream date, only to discover Mrs. Galanis had handed over her pounds before her. She attempted to pay her back, but the other woman refused. “Come on, I’m starving and definitely need caffeine.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> By the end, you'll know the full details of that night. Claire is still unravelling all of it in her mind.


	9. Chapter 9

They tell the cab driver to pull over on the curb. She can’t have it spring up on her all of a sudden. She needs to acclimate herself to her surroundings before she can approach it.

Mother and daughter walk down the street, neither saying a word. Claire’s eyes are sharp and alert as they roam over the street. Not much has changed in the last twenty years. Some of the homes have been repainted or touched up, but it isn’t unfamiliar to her. Her pace slows as they near the place of many horrors.

“So this is it?”

Claire nods as she stares up at the imposing structure from her childhood. Her memories hadn’t been impacted by her sometimes overactive imagination. The place that once brought her comfort was the source of her current nightmares. It was difficult to reconcile in her mind how the images could coexist.

“Yeah, this is the place.”

She had learned that she was co-owner from Mrs. Galanis. Her biological relatives decided against selling the property, not that it was willed to them anyway. People were hired to keep the property from falling into disrepair, hence its’ stately appearance.

It appears as it does in her memory. The Victorian house with its’ large bay window, the slate roof, the front garden her mother spent many afternoons tending remind her that she can’t allow ‘that night’ to poison what she does retain from her childhood. Her innocence may have died the night she walked down those steps, hand tightly clutching a police officer’s as they escorted her away from the scene of the crime, taking her away from all of the horrors she suffered.

“There,” she points to the bay window. “I used to sit there for hours on end reading. I was unusual and rarely read children’s books unless it was for my schoolwork. I liked plays, which my parents encouraged. Mrs. Galanis cultivated a love of classic literature in me and I would sit there, rain or shine, on cold, blistery days. It didn’t matter. Sometimes I sat there day dreaming or observing the neighbors or watching my mother tend her garden.” Her activities varied depending on the day, but that window was the place she went to whenever she needed time alone. She did her homework there. She fell asleep, curled in a ball, her father carrying her up to her bedroom when it got late. That was her spot.

She walks closer, opening the ancient gate, she steps into a different world.

_She is seven._

_Clara peers at her neighbors house forlornly. Mrs. Galanis went on holiday to visit her family in Greece, taking away Clara’s refuge. She opens the gate, that decides for once not to stick, and walks up the cleared path. She spent her weekend plucking weeds for some pocket money. She jumps over the cracks, heeding the warnings about stepping on them and breaking her mother’s back, stopping to pick a flower from the garden. She knows her mother won’t mind._

_She likes to admire the beauty of the natural world. She loves flowers and is envious her parents bestowed her sister’s with flower names, while she is Clara. How is that remotely fair? Couldn’t she be Violet or Lily? Instead she is Clara, the odd one out. Her sister Poppy calls her a misfit and says their parents adopted her. She is too hesitant and worried to ask them to verify her sister’s claims. She wonders if there is a kernel of truth to what Poppy has said. Perhaps that explains the difference in their names. Maybe they have a preference for their biological children._

_With a sigh, she takes out her key and slides it into the lock, twisting it until she hears a click. She hears someone call her name and turns around to catch the friendly wave of her neighbor across the street, Mr. Miller. She waves back before turning the knob and entering her home._

_It is silent. She hadn’t expected much different. Her parents normally solicited the services of her neighbor, however with the woman out of town, they scrambled and panicked. Too much of their time is occupied with their careers and their time at her sister’s bedside._

_Rosie isn’t getting better. Even though she isn’t supposed to, she snuck out of her bed to her parents’ bedroom, leaning in at the door as they discussed her sister’s declining health. The prognosis isn’t good. She had to look up the word in the dictionary and then spent an hour crying. Rosie is going to die._

_She shuts the door and locks it behind her. Her parents made her promise she would do that. Her mother will call in a bit to check if she is home. One day she got distracted by one of her neighbors and their new puppy, missing the daily call, resulting in her mother panicking something horrible happened to her. She apologized over and over for worrying and explained the puppy. Her mother rang the neighbor to confirm her side of the story._

_Clara was insulted at the notion her mother couldn’t trust her._

_She tugs the stupid ribbon out of her hair, dropping it on one of the tables in the entry hall. She hates when her mother ties the dumb ribbons in her hair or adds some barrette to clip back her bangs. She prefers her hair down, whilst her mother ignores her and styles it every morning._

_Huffing, she shrugs her satchel off, dragging it with her to the bay window. It is her favorite part of the house aside from her bedroom. There’s a seat her parents had constructed and no one else ever sits there except Clara. She has a perfect view of the street. She likes to watch when the post arrives and sprints out of her door to collect it. She has seen the couple across the street get into several loud rows, resulting in the police arriving on the scene._

_Instead of puling out her homework, she decides it is a watching sort of afternoon. The flowers are finally in bloom with the late arrival of spring. It is still a bit brisk out, but she wears a light jacket instead of a heavy coat. Her mother has even allowed her to forego wearing those itchy tights that she hates. She wears her knee high socks instead. _

_She watches Hannah, who is a few years older than her sisters walk home. There is a smile on her face. Clara loves her orange colored hair and wishes her own blonde was the color of fire. People tease Hannah for having red hair and freckles. Poppy says red hair is the sign of the devil, or so says the kids at school. Clara told her sister to stuff it and piss off, which unfortunately her mother overheard. She had to sit for five minutes with soap in her mouth._

_Ms. Sherwood tends to her garden. Her brimmed hat covers her face, protecting it from the late afternoon sun. It is quite warm and her house is a little stuffy, still Clara knows she isn’t allowed to leave or fiddle with any of the temperature settings._

_Mr. Preston is walking his new puppy and Clara coos at the sight of the little corgi. She begged her mum for one, but her mother said it isn’t the right time with her sister in the hospital and how busy their lives are. She disagrees and thinks a puppy would live things up around their house. Everyone walks around like a zombie. She misses the way it used to be, at least she can count on her neighbors for some normalcy._

_The window watching became a favorite pastime of hers after Rosie’s first hospitalization. It was how she reminded herself that while everything changed in her house, it didn’t mean it had for everyone else. Her neighbors went about their lives. Occasionally they came calling and sent over food to express their sorrow at the tragedy that has befallen their family, but overall, their lives have remained unaffected. They are whole and intact, unlike hers._

“I loved sitting in that window. I started doing it after Rosie. Her diagnosis changed a lot for our family and I liked seeing how not everything changed.”

Claire leads her mother to the porch stairs, taking a seat. “We sat out here in the summer with our ice cream on the warm days. We played our silly games in the yard with the jump rope. We would watch the clouds with Rosie during the rare times she came home. She didn’t have a lot of energy towards the end, so we did a lot of low energy activities. We played dolls.” She takes a breath, glancing up at her mom. “One year for Christmas, our parents had dolls made in our images. We carried them everywhere with us.”

It was before the sickness, before Poppy treated her like a leper, before her father lost his mind, and long before she realized she lived with the monster under the bed. Before she and Poppy realized they only had each other.

“The window right above us on the second floor was my room. There are six bedrooms, but my sisters liked the idea of sharing, being twins and all. When we were all really little, I used to live in there too, but when I turned four I told my parents I wanted my own room.”

“Do you ever miss the house and what it represented to you, the child you?”

Claire crinkles her brow as she cranes her neck to look up at the house. “It was- yes sometimes I suppose I do. It was easier to convince myself I never had any good moments here because then I didn’t have to think about what I lost. Birmingham was all I had known. Granted, it had become its’ own kind of hell towards the end, but it was the place where I been the process of becoming who I am. It’s where my mum and sister are.”

“What about Poppy? Where is she?”

She shrugs. After she was released from the hospital into foster care, no one told her anything about her older sister. “I don’t know. I know she lived after, but they didn’t tell me about her condition or anything like that. My family didn’t visit and they’re the only ones who would know. I wouldn’t even know how to get in contact with them now.”

They sit there in silence, Claire reflecting on the place that had once been her haven from the real world. Kathy watches her daughter, imagining a younger version of the girl who came to live with her. She doesn’t have any pictures from when she was little.

Claire straightens her shoulders, eyes narrowing as she catches sight of the little lawn ornament. She pushes herself up, walking towards it. She picks it up and grins at her mother when she something shiny reflects back at her. Bending over, she picks up the key and holds it up. She can’t say if she is ready or not to face her fears about what lies beyond the front door, but this trip has been about facing her past. She doesn’t want it hanging over her shoulder any longer.

“Are you sure honey?”

She doesn’t answer, walking past her mother and sliding the key into place. She hears the familiar click. She opens the door and walks inside, disarming the alarm. Whoever is looking after the place hadn’t changed the code from her and her sisters’ birthdays. And then she swallows as she turns, taking in the entry hall and the stairs leading to the second floor.

The furniture is covered with sheets, but otherwise the place has remained undisturbed for twenty years. There is a thick layer of dust as she brushes her fingers over the banister. She stops when her eyes land on the family portrait.

It was the last one they took as a family of five. There she is Rosalia before the hair loss and the sickness. Her eyes are bright and vibrant, bursting with life as she beams at the camera. She radiates sunshine and happiness. “That’s my sister Rosie,” she points to her. “She was six. This was just before the cancer.” Next to her, looking a little dour is Poppy. Poppy always had that uppity look about her, somewhat haughty.

In front of them is her with a wide smile and two missing teeth. Her blonde hair cascades down her back, pushed back by a hairband.

“You were adorable.”

Claire ducks her head. “I was tiny for my age. The older kids picked on me because I was smarter than them. I switched schools halfway through reception.”

“By the time you came to live with us, your hair was a few shades darker.”

When she was a kid, she was about as blonde as her sisters, with theirs just a shade touch lighter than hers. Still, all of them took after their mother in that respect. “That’s my mum.” She ignores the man beside her, the one not befitting the titles given to him.

He appears so innocuous that it is almost unfathomable to believe he is the same man known for his prolific killings of thirty women, one of which occurred in this very house.

“You look like her,” Kathy murmurs, noting the similarities between mother and daughter. Claire dyed her hair darker than it really was, ready to go to the salon at the slightest hint of a light root. It was naturally a shade or two darker than her biological mother’s. Claire’s was more of a honey blonde at this stage of her life, not that anyone would know that. They had the same heart shape face and the slope of their noses were similar. There was the same proud jut of their chins. “She was beautiful and so are you.”

Claire leans into her mom, pressing her lips to the older woman’s cheeks. “She was. That’s Poppy. She hated dressing up and taking the photos. We posed for family photos after, but it was never the same.There was this missing piece.” She ignores the hall leading to the place where her father kept his tools and trophies. “We couldn’t quite capture what we lost after Rosalia.”

At the trial, prosecutors presented all of the evidence from his weapons to photos he took during the various stages of the rapes and murders. Then there were the tokens he took and keep on his shelves, proudly displayed for him to remember his accomplishments.

Claire wasn’t in court on those days, but she read about them later. She was disgusted at the idea of living in a house with all of that.

She led her mom into the library with the bay window. The shelves contain hundreds of titles and she spots her old satchel, splayed on the floor from where she left it that day. Her fingers brush over the spines of the books, many of them a great deal older than her. “My parents didn’t know I could read until I was four. I pulled down this,” in her hands is a book on Greek mythology. “And sat there, reading when my mother walked in. She thought I was pretending until I told her about what was happening.”

Her mother had been surprised to discover her four year old taught herself how to read. When her mother read to her each night, she paid close attention to the words on the page, memorizing them, testing out the sounds. “This was my sanctuary. Poppy was into sports. She played footy.”

Claire was as far from coordinated as one could get, often tripping and bumping into things. “Rosie, she was the artist. She painted that.”

Kathy turns and gapes at the portrait of her daughter. Her blonde hair was half pinned back, with long curls trailing down her back. Her blue eyes shone brightly, sparkling with unrestricted happiness. Her mouth was open wide, forming a large smile, with her baby teeth still present. She could see how those features matured into her fully grown daughter standing beside her. Even then, she had a strong jawline.

There is something wholly innocent about the little girl in the painting. Kathy realizes with a start that there are no shadows in her eyes. She isn’t carrying two decades worth of baggage. She doesn’t know the horror film her life is about to become in a few short years, have never experienced loss. Clara, aged five, is captured forever as the sweet soul of a little girl who hadn’t deserved to be plagued by the sins of someone else.

Claire leads her mother out of the room, peering one last time at the dusty library, her sanctuary. She avoids the daunting hallway, the scene of her nightmares. Her eyes linger on the door of the closet, the one where she peed herself, the one her father dragged her out of, kicking and screaming. She winces, feeling the phantom tendrils of pain, the raw ache in her throat as she begged and pleaded until she was hoarse, the sting of tears as they spilled onto her cheeks.

She shakes her head, moving towards the stairs. The walls are littered with pictures, telling the story of her life. After age 7, Rosie disappears, and it is just Poppy and Clara. Whilst they weren’t close when Rosalia was alive, they recognized that they were all each other had left of her. It forged a closeness in them that had been missing in their relationship. Clara hadn’t thought it possible for them to develop their passive sisterhood into something meaningful, then Poppy defended her against some bullies. There was a scuffle and her sister was punished, but the dynamics of their relationship were forever changed when she realized her sister did have her back.

Kathy takes it all, getting all of these glimpses of the small child her daughter used to be. At almost twelve, she was on the verge of becoming a woman and well into her adolescence. It was amazing to see all of these pictures depicting her childhood, simpler times in her life.

Clara pauses at the landing, startled by the familiarity of the hallway. In her dreams, it is dark and silent, eerie. In the light of day, the cream colored walls are inviting. The mix of art and family photos are welcoming and make the place feel homey. The hall table is filled with all the little trinkets her mother collected. The rug is the same. It’s like stepping back in time and her breath hitches, heart rate increasing as she takes it all in.

She feels a soothing hand touch her shoulder, her mother’s voice telling her to breathe with her. Her panic settles and she takes a step to the right. Her parents bedroom is at the opposite end, away from her and Poppy’s rooms. There are some other rooms up here, but they rarely figure into her memories.

She pauses, placing her palm on the door. It is closed. The last time she touched it, she left it open as she left her bedroom, seeking solace. She twists the knob and pushes it open, and memories flood her brain as she overwhelmed by her bedroom. Tentatively, she steps inside and feels transformed, she’s Clara again.

In the middle of the room is her little tea table with her plastic desserts and pretty tea set. She and Poppy had many tea parties at that table. On the wall is a massive poster of _The Spice Girls. _She and her sister listened to them whenever they could, having dance parties together and just enjoying their lives. Her desk is intact, nothing having been moved. Her pencil sits atop a pile of unfinished homework. A textbook is opened to a set of differential equations and a copy of _Romeo & Juliet_ sits surreptitiously, awaiting for its’ owner to return.

Her bulletin board is covered in dozens of photos, postcards, little notes, and tickets from the cinema and concerts. Everything she once valued is there. She brushes a finger over the polaroid of her and her sisters. They wore matching dresses because their mother loved when they wore the same thing. It was before Rosie got sick. Her sisters were six and she was five. As usual, Rosie was the one fully smiling with her teeth, while she and Poppy merely tilted up their lips, but they were undeniably happy. There was nothing wrong in their perfect world.

“Ahh, the infamous school picture smile,” she glowers at her mother as she moves next to her. “So it wasn’t just with us?”

“No, I never was fond of smiling with my teeth, especially before I got braces. Rosie, she had the best smile and it was warm and confident.” Clara had forgotten what her sister looked like. Despite being twins, they weren’t identical. However, they had their pictures to remember Rosie and the home videos to hear the sweet lilt of her voice. So much time has passed that even if she strained, she couldn’t recall the sound of her sister’s voice. She unpins the photo, pocketing it. It is hers after all.

Kathy pretends not to notice the action. When her daughter was first placed with them, she didn’t have much. She had a few clothes, a book, her locket and charm bracelet. That was it. As her eyes roam over the bedroom of her young daughter, she has to swallow back her tears. She had a full life. She wasn’t this dour, unhappy child. The bed covers are still thrown back from when Clara Beauchamp left her bed.

There are clothes hanging in the wardrobe, color coded the same way Claire organizes her clothes as an adult. The room is clean and orderly, her daughter’s tiny uniform is draped over the chair. She can see her in this room, pacing in circles, doing her homework, playing with her sister.

The pale pink of the walls and bedspread is surprising. She hadn’t thought of her as particularly girly. “I picked the pink for my eighth birthday. They used to be yellow.” She makes a face. “It was ghastly and clashed with everything.” Her fingers trail over the bookshelf, host to more books, all of these belonging to young Clara.

She steps over to the window, eyes peering out onto the familiar street. She spies Ms. Sherwood tending her garden, recognizing the familiar wide brimmed hat. Walking down the street is Mr. Preston with a corgi, not the one she knew. As much as her life has changed, it brings a comfort to her to observe all of these similarities. She thought she had lost all of this, but it is here. The people who filled her childhood with hope and positivity, who baked cookies for she and Poppy, who looked out for them, and even a few visited her in hospital.

For so long, when she thought of her childhood, all that came to mind was that night and the resulting aftermath. But there was so much good too. She had forgotten.

“Is this the doll?”

She turns and there her mother is holding her beloved doll, “Beth,” she breathes.

“I’m guessing short for Elizabeth.”

“Actually, I named her Bethany. The Beth does derive from my middle name, but I thought she needed her own proper name.” She clutches the doll close, stroke her fingers through the curly blonde locks. “I remember how badly I wanted her when I was in hospital. I couldn’t say anything and I doubt anyone would’ve come back to get her.” She won’t be leaving her behind. There are a few other mementos she plans to take home with her, but before she can sort through her belongings, there’s one place she has left to visit.

She can’t leave here without going in there and facing the room where all of her nightmares occurred. “Come on, there’s somewhere I have to show you and a story that I need to share.”

After nearly twenty years, she is finally going to tell the story of the night her mother was murdered. Her mom deserves to hear the harrowing tale after all these years of patiently waiting for her to open up and what better place to do it than the room where it happened. She wants her to see it for herself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm on a roll. I've managed to update 3 different stories. I'm pretty happy about that.
> 
> The next chapter we will finally get the full night from beginning to end.


End file.
